My Internship Adventures at HackerRank: The Beginning
“It’s been a long time coming…”
- Taylor Swift
My experience at HackerRank has been nothing short of magical ✨. And finally, after interning for six months, I joined HackerRank as an SDE-1, this June🎉.
Every good story deserves to be shared, and this is the story of my beginning at HackerRank.
P.S. This will be a series of blogs, so stay tuned for more in the future.
It was early October of 2023, I was in the 7th Semester of my B.Tech degree. With a recession looming 🌧️ and a college requirement for a six-month internship in our final semester, I was actively applying for internships. That’s when I came across an SDE intern opening at HackerRank. Almost instinctively, I clicked “apply”.
A few days later, I received an email with a link to a HackerRank test 📧. Unlike a traditional OA with complex DSA questions, it consisted of a simple question that tested our ability to translate basic logic into code.
Fast forward to October 16, 2023, ⏩, I was on campus when I received a call from Prateek 📞, informing me that I’d been shortlisted for the interview process. My first interview would be with none other than the Co-founder and CTO of the company, Harishankaran K., and it would be entirely based on my resume. Prateek explicitly mentioned that there would be no DSA questions.
It’s ironic since HackerRank is widely known for DSA preparation among students, However, DSA isn’t a requirement for intern hiring at HackerRank; development skills are.
I was super pumped but also a bit nervous. And as if the CTO being involved in the intern hiring process wasn’t shocking enough, I later learned during my internship onboarding that Hari manually shortlists all the resumes!
But this is what I love most about the culture at HackerRank: everyone, no matter their position, is given equal attention and importance in the company.
Back to the story, I started reading more about the company, its values and the “HackerRank Internship Experience” blogs over the Internet and, oh boy was it a rabbit hole. The more blogs I read the more badly I wanted this internship.
I started preparing for the big day by brushing up on the projects I wanted to showcase during the interview, recalling all the minute details and achievements from my previous internships and revisiting my handwritten React and JS notes.
I also reached out to former HackerRank interns on LinkedIn for some tips. Apoorve and Harsh were kind enough to help me with some great advice, and as fate would have it, Apoorve became my mentor throughout my six-month internship at HackerRank✨.
Finally, the day of my first interview arrived 🗓️. Like any interview horror story, mine began with Zoom crashing 🖥️💥. After several attempts to restart Zoom and rejoin, Hari decided to proceed with the interview over a call while I kept my camera on in Zoom(Modern problems require modern solutions). Thanks to Hari being super chill and understanding, the interview went smoothly despite the “minor” mishap. It began with an introduction and a showcase of my projects, a deep dive into my open-source contributions, and my internship projects. What stood out to me was that Hari was interested not only in how I built something but also in why I built it.
Given Hari’s (in)famous Poker face, I didn’t know how my interview went until the last minute when he said someone would get back to me with the next steps. Surely enough I received an email for my second interview, this time with Vaasavi (better known as The Super Boss💪).
Even before the interview started I felt like I already knew Vaasavi, thanks to all the blogs I’ve read over the week for my interview preparation. Putting her Super Boss image aside, if I were to describe Vaasavi in one word, it would be “sunshine” ☀️🌻. The interview began with a lighthearted introduction, followed by a discussion about my interests, expectations for and from the internship, and my college’s policy for a six-month onsite internship(this was the best part about the internship, no cap💃🏻).
My third and final interview was with the Senior Director of Engineering at HackerRank, Akshay, who later became my engineering manager! The structure was similar to the first interview: we discussed my projects and previous internship experiences, my interests, and the kind of projects I wanted to work on. It felt more like a one-on-one conversation than an interview. Akshay has such a cool personality that it’s hard to tell he’s an engineering director unless you look at his calendar 🗓️💀.
Just 30 minutes after the interview, Vaasavi and Prateek informed me via Zoom call that I had been offered the internship!!!🎯🎉
And that’s how my journey at HackerRank began. More in my next blog.
