My Microsoft Internship
I wrapped up my Microsoft internship for Software Engineering on August 28th, as a rising fourth year in Redmond, Washington. Here are my thoughts.
As I am writing this, I find myself in a kind of stupor. I am not exactly sure what I should talk about, what I should emphasize, what I should ignore, etc. It has been a fairly long 3 month internship. I met a lot of people, but definitely could have met more. I made a lot of design decisions, and some of them could have been better. I learnt a lot about the methodology of designing software at scale, where security and privacy are core components.
I did a lot of things, yet I could’ve done a lot more, both in my work life and my personal life.
To give a fair description and review, given my indecisiveness about what to write and my laziness about writing a lot, I decided to divide my internship into three periods: early (around the first two weeks), middle (the bulk of the three months) and late (the last three weeks). Without further ado, let’s start.
I will probably write another blog on what I learnt, so wait for that.
Early Period
Section titled “Early Period”This is the first two weeks. I remember when I first arrived, the first thing I thought was that the Microsoft campus just feels like a university campus. There are a lot of buildings I can enter with my ID card, and it was great. The not so great part was that all the buildings were basically the same, sans some differences that correlated to the building’s age. I think I visited more than 20 Microsoft buildings, and after the first 5, there wasn’t really a lot to see.
Some buildings had very nice easter eggs, such as the Gundam figure below, which I really really liked as a Gundam figure collector (successfully collected one for now). Others were just a stack of cubicles, smaller than 64 square feet. So which building you get probably has a large effect on your experience — at least it did on mine.
After that, I met my manager and mentor, who I shall keep anonymous for now. First impression was that they were really nice, and I could feel that they wanted me to succeed. Second impression was that I am the first intern they had in at least half a decade, and the only intern they’re gonna have this cycle.
Of course, after realizing this, I set out to impress them, even staying a little past 5 PM to make sure I was ahead. I had a goal to make my first pull request within the first week, which I think helped me a lot in getting ahead of everything.
At this point, my task was just getting my local dev box ready and being able to run the application locally. These were fairly easy tasks, but also fairly time consuming — given that a lot of the services were using some sort of auth, you needed to follow a set of rules to make it work locally without breaking things.
I remember one Wednesday when I stayed a little late, my boss came up to tell me that I should take it easy and that he was impressed by my performance. I was a little touched by that, and I decided to try and follow his advice. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of my internship, I still stayed longer in the office, at least until 7 PM, because of my housing situation.
Housing situation
Section titled “Housing situation”I ended up finding a posting on Discord (not the best, I know) that was suspiciously good. The rent was on the expensive side but still reasonable, and it was in Bellevue, 15 minutes by bus from Microsoft. The room was small with no overhead light, but it was fine for my purposes.
What was not so fine is that my landlord was running an illegal Airbnb business out of the other two rooms, basically forcing me to live with dozens of strangers for the duration of my internship. To say I was uncomfortable would be an understatement, and even after telling her about it, she didn’t relent. It is probably good context to know that I was not aware of this before renting, and it was not mentioned in my lease agreement.
So I wanted to spend as little time in the house as possible. I consider myself averagely-verted, hopefully that’s a word, but I still didn’t like meeting so many strangers, some of whom felt fairly dangerous. I ended up spending most of my time at the office, leaving at 9 PM on average. Add an hour or two in the gym, and I would be back home around 11, where I would just go to sleep and the cycle would repeat.
The first few weeks were terrible, but as humans naturally adapt to things, I did too, and it wasn’t so bad anymore. And it wasn’t all bad — staying in the office so late made me pick up a lot of good habits.
For one, maybe because I was still physically at work, I felt more comfortable allocating time to computer science and math. It gave me a lot of time to think about how I type, and to relearn typing the correct way. I felt encouraged to learn Rust, which I am very happy to be using. I now do the Leetcode of the day, which I look forward to every day, and I do mental math stuff too.
These were all things I wanted to get into but either didn’t have time for, felt too burnt out from coding all day to do, or just didn’t want to do. Now I have a number of good habits that I feel good about, and like a nice typeracer quote says,
Middle Period
Section titled “Middle Period”The bulk of my internship, and where I mostly worked on my project. For context, at Microsoft, interns are usually assigned a big project instead of small tasks, and they take ownership of it. Whether it actually gets deployed or not is a different matter, but that’s basically your whole thing as an intern. For policy reasons, since my project was checked in and merged into the codebase but not yet released, I can’t talk too much about it here.
This period was fairly cool, and full of design choices. I talked a lot with my mentor about different tradeoffs, implementations and customer privacy. If you don’t know, Microsoft prides itself on handling your data very privately, and it felt true — it took a lot of jumping through hoops, talking to legal and other teams, just to get access to data sources that are fairly trivial but are nonetheless customer data.
My project was hosted in 2 mono-repos that dozens of teams and hundreds of developers push code to, which was a little disorienting at times. God knows how many git rebases I had to do, and how many hours I spent waiting on builds and tests. But I picked up a lot of good habits for working on big software.
It feels bureaucratic, and it is, but that’s one of those things bound to exist in big corporations, kind of similar to Ramsey’s number.
There were a lot of Microsoft-hosted events, and a lot of prizes I ended up winning. There was the interns hackathon and the interns puzzleday. I didn’t win either, but came fairly close! I met a few interns there, which was the bulk of the interns I met all summer. Not meeting more of them did fill me with a little regret, but since I was basically the only intern in my building, it wasn’t easy to do.
Picture of some of my winnings will be added on a later update.
I went kayaking for the first time with my intern cohort — the people who joined Microsoft at the same time as you. It was really fun, and it made me aware that even though I can lift many times my weight, my cardio was fairly awful. I did work on that later in the gym.
I made sure to explore Seattle, Redmond and Bellevue too. The aquarium, Mount Rainier and the Bellevue Botanical Garden were my favourite spots.
Picture of mount reiner will be added on a later iteration
The highlight, though, was getting to attend the Egypt vs Iran World Cup match. I never expected to watch Egypt play a World Cup game in person, let alone a short trip from my office, so the whole thing felt a little surreal. The crowd was the best part of it, and it was easily the most at home I felt all summer.
This was also when I was most consistent with my habits, and when I started feeling the benefits. Even though my housing situation still sucked, it is hard to deny that it helped me in a lot of ways.
It was around this point that I began hearing horror stories from other interns about their experiences, managers and mentors. I know it shouldn’t make me feel this way, but it made me more grateful, and more willing to take advantage of my circumstances.
Overall, I had a lot of fun and could feel my skills evolving.
Late Period
Section titled “Late Period”Around 3 weeks before the end. At this point I was done with my project and was deploying and testing it rigorously, and preparing the slides for the presentation I was gonna give to my VP.
My mentor, who was my main point of contact, went on vacation around then, which introduced some hurdles but ended up bringing me much closer to the rest of the team. Before he left, I was too dependent on him. After he left, I talked to a lot more people — we talked about powerlifting, life and kids (I don’t have any kids), and played a lot of ping pong. It was a fun time that I regret not getting to sooner, but better late than never.
This was also when I started realizing my time was almost up. I went out to explore a lot more buildings, even checking out Microsoft’s quantum computer, just so I knew I didn’t miss anything. I tried a lot of the famous spots in Bellevue, good Indian places and so on. The days were moving fast and it didn’t feel like enough, but I still enjoyed it. After all, this might be the last time I visit this campus, so I made sure to take a lot of pictures.
Rolling out my code was fine, if a lot more bureaucratic than it needs to be. I still picked up a lot of skills and learned a lot of new software along the way, even if it could have been faster and less stressful.
Review
Section titled “Review”Just like all things in life, it could’ve gone better and it could’ve gone worse. I could’ve met more interns and had fun with people my age, and I could’ve isolated myself even more because of the housing situation. But I feel satisfied with the experience, which is one of the reasons I am even writing this.
I feel grateful to everybody who made this possible. To God, to my parents, friends and teachers. To my mentor and managers, and my co-workers. I left Seattle on August 29th with few regrets, and I do feel lucky for that.