Intern to FTE Conversion(Tesco)

Hello Everyone!

Today we will be discussing about the conversion from an Intern to FTE(Full Time Employment) in Tesco. To shed some context into how I got this opportunity lets go back by an year. In the month of April 2023 Tesco came to our college for hiring Interns for a period of 1 year. It was pretty surprising since not many companies provide that, also many institutes don’t have the capability to have there students onsite during 7th semester and basically provide hybrid(online/offline) form of education. Tesco hired 3 Interns from our college and I was fortunately one of them. One can find the internship interview experience here.

I will cover the internship experience in some other article since there were so many learnings that are there to be shared with all of you.

Basically there were 2 stages of evaluation which were to be done for 1 year interns at Tesco. The first evaluation was done after 6 months where in it was a closed door discussion among the senior managers about our learnings related to technical stack, contributions to Tesco and how we were settling in. I specifically had a 1 hour long discussion with my manager where we discussed about the various nitty gritty of the project which I was part of and the scope of contributing to various projects at our organisation. The results of this round were not declared and just scope of improvements and what we could do apart from the things that we were doing were told to us. Getting feedback was a key aspect after the first 6 months of internship.

After the first 6 months it was very clear to me that if this would have been a 6 month internship I most certainly would not have qualified into becoming a FTE. Retail domain is something which has a lot of things to consider especially when operating at a scale at which Tesco does. In the next 6 months the main improvement that I brought in myself was to question as much as I could and whatever I didn’t understand. Nothing should be assumed in a professional world. Coming out straight from college where in we could assume a lot of things just to make a working model out of our project to showcase that we have something promising does not work in the real world. When you are part of the main backend team and even a single error could result into direct loss of business, nothing should be assumed, even if a doubt sounds dumb it must and should be clarified. My clarity of thoughts were getting better and at the same time I was implementing the win together behaviours at Tesco.

During the end of our tenure we were told that there will be 2 rounds of interview. First round will be with our SDM(Software Development Manager) and the second round will be with our Director and HoSD(Head of Software Development). Both these rounds were technical in nature and were on the work which we did in Tesco. This is the place where I would like to recommend every Intern/FTE to document the work that you or your team is doing cause this was a game changer during my interview.

Now we will discuss about what happened during both the rounds in detail.

Round 1:

My SDM was actively looking out for the work that I was doing during my internship and questioned me exactly where he felt I could have improved upon and this enlightened me to think out of the box for a couple of things before my final interview. Also he advised me to prepare my presentation in a manner which could convey the outcome of what I have been working on rather than the output which was crucial since I had to work on improving the way that I was presenting the work that I had done. Its not about how much I have done although that is definitely a factor but was more about how have I done it? What decisions were taken while implementing the solution? How many solutions were explored? What were some of the major challenges faced? How did I overcome them and stuff like those. After a month of time I had to present to Director and HoSD.

Round 2:

Before going into the interview I was pretty nervous cause it was a do or die situation. This is exactly the place where mentors come in handy. My mentor said only one line which completely killed all anxiety/nervousness/excitement that I had :)

She said “Some people try to fake it but you have actually done a lot of work during your tenure as an Intern so there is nothing to fear, whatever they ask answer honestly and fearlessly since there is nothing to hide”. All the fear that I had …. gone straight out of the window. I went in to give the interview not as an Intern but as a Developer who understood the work that he has done and the impact that he could bring in the near future.

Meanwhile the PPT that I made also went straight out of the window with my fear since our Director and HoSDs were not interested in the PPT. They wanted have a more conversation like interview. I sat down with Director beside me on my left hand side. Our teams previous HoSD in front of me on a round table and our teams new HoSD on my right. Conversation opened with them being curious about the project that I was working on what impact it brought and why was it present in the first place. I explained to them about the business value it provides and the nitty gritty of it all.

The main questions which were asked to me by panel were →

1. How are you maintaining the security aspects of writing the code and storing data?(In short, we had reduced significant amount of tech debt which could mount to having vulnerabilities in terms of security aspects and well defined contracts enabled us to understand that there were no PIP data which were being messed around with)
2. What strategic APIs were implemented and what were there functions?
3. What are the test cases which you have covered and what is the testing strategy that you and your team uses to ensure that the code works fine in all environment irrespective of it being on Dev, PPE and PROD.
4. Explain to me some of the JUnit test cases which you have written along with examples.
5. Provide the design diagrams/decision which you were part of and also provide the sequence diagrams of the APIs which you created. These were self explanatory so I faced no issues and panel were happy that I was following proper SDLC Agile approach to tackle my tasks.
6. What was the one time you went against your team during a design discussion or code review discussion and what was the conclusion/learning that you had from it.

For the last question I would like to answer it since it has a very key principle of design involved in it. There was a time when my HoSD once said on the context of Tech and life perhaps :) → its not about easy or tough, its about right or wrong.

We were migrating one of our key services from a previous version to a newer version and during that time the implementation of a particular use case was that we had to convert a string to its Base64 form and pass it down through the header while passing the request to the API through which we were expecting some results. So normal way to accomplish this would be to use Java Encoder/Decoder in the code but this would break 2 key software design principles which were Single Responsibility Principle(SRP) and the other was Open Closed Principle.

It would break Single Responsibility in the sense that the responsibility of that particular function was just to call the API and not to do any operations within it like conversion of a string to Base64. It would break Open Closed principle in the sense that we were touching a piece of code which was closed for modification. I was able to solve this problem in a very sophisticated and meticulous manner.

After this Director asked me if I had any questions for them and as usual I had one question for the three of them. We discussed on it for another 15 mins and the interview came to an end and a sigh of relief. I had a discussion with my SDM once again after the final round where after hearing all of what happened in the interview he was happy with the way it went.

After a couple of days the results came out and all three folks from our college were converted to FTE. Thank you everyone for being a patient reader, I hope you learned something new. Have a great day!!