☁ My Salesforce SWE Internship ☁️
“The day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit.”- Fabienne Fredrickson
Approximately 24 months ago, I risked everything and decided to switch my major from Mechanical Engineering to Computer Science. Don’t take that in the wrong way, I am an automobile fanatic and I was pretty good at that stuff but I was super intrigued by the concept of programming in general and I carry a curious mind. There I stood, with a few months to graduate and a newfound interest to explore in this field.
I decided to follow my gut and made a decision to come to the states to study computer science at USC in fall 2018 (that journey in itself warrants a separate post but let’s keep that for another time). With no formal education in CS and no professional experience, it was then an uphill battle for me — I took hardcore CS courses to build my fundamentals and gained experience through an internship and other campus activities. I was never in a hurry as I knew these things took time and I was determined to become a better SWE.
This summer I had an amazing opportunity to be a part of Salesforce’s MuleSoft team as a SWE Intern. It is rightly said “There are no shortcuts to any place worth going”, my journey to Salesforce started years ago when I made that gut call to follow my passion for computer science.
I had heard so much about Salesforce — world’s #1 CRM platform, #1 on the FORTUNE “World’s Best Workplaces” List, LinkedIn Top Companies — Where the U.S. Wants To Work Now — but it was when I was interviewing with them that I learned about their culture of Ohana (one big family) and how powerful that was within the organisation. I learned about their 1–1–1 philanthropic model designed for giving back to the community. I listened to Marc Benioff’s commencement speech at USC (his alma mater) a hundred times! All of these things felt so aligned with my personal values that I started rooting for a place on this rocket ship.
💙🤍 Amazing Interview Experience 🤍💙
Salesforce had the best interview process among all that I’ve been through, it was extremely smooth, transparent, and very clearly laid out. Big shoutout to my recruiters Sarah Reid and Alania Soto. They helped me a lot throughout the recruitment process and beyond. I feel the Futureforce recruitment team had put a lot of thought into designing their recruiting process, considering the candidate’s side as well and that was evident throughout. The interviewers were extremely professional and friendly at the same time, I got a glimpse of the Ohana culture I was going to be a part of. The day I got an offer from Salesforce was a day I would never forget. I vividly remember talking to Sarah that day and feeling a sense of satisfaction for all the hard work I had put in.
Covid-19 did certainly cast a few stones in the way of the internship program. It is really worth appreciating how swiftly the internship program was transitioned into a completely remote one without compromising on the quality of the experience. The credit goes to the Futureforce team for the work put in the backend for re-imagining the internship program and making this transition possible.
🌟 💥 12 weeks of impactful work 💥 🌟
I was a part of Mulesoft’s iPaaS (CloudHub) team, which is responsible for hosting and managing customer integrations in the cloud. Part of my team was based in SF and part in Bueno Aires and all were working remotely.
From my first day, I felt like a part of the team, everyone was extremely welcoming and helpful, which made for a smooth onboarding experience. Special thanks to my manager Narendra and my trail guide Henry who were very considerate of the fact that this being a remote internship, the first couple of weeks would be a bit hard. They took out extra time to help me onboard. In my first week itself, I had to work on designing my V2MOM for the summer. V2MOM stands for Vision-Values-Methods-Measures-Obstacles, a management process developed by Marc Benioff several years ago to ensure complete alignment of thoughts and goals within the company. This was pretty cool as I was able to pin down my vision for the summer, list down values that were important to me and my team throughout, brainstorm methods to achieve my vision, outline ways for measuring success, and be aware of the obstacles that could be present.
Throughout my internship, I participated in sprints and daily standup meetings, alongside my teammates and directly contributed to projects the team was working on. This was awesome as I got to work on interesting, customer-facing solutions by collaborating with some really smart people in my team. Among other things, I contributed new features to the CloudHub’s auto-update service which is responsible for updating over 150,000+ Salesforce customer applications every month. I also got to collaborate with senior engineers on a new SaaS service called Transit Gateways which MuleSoft was developing for providing our customers with a better way of connecting their resources with CloudHub VPCs. I realised how customer-centric Mulesoft (and Salesforce in general) was, as this was the most requested service by our customers (most voted by customers on Ideas Portal) and I felt extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to contribute to its development and release. Through the tasks I performed, I got to be a part of and understand CloudHub’s entire SDLC and was able to see my features go through the various stages of release and into the hands of our customers- always an amazing feeling for any SWE intern.
I felt I was surrounded by the right kind of people, who deeply cared about my internship experience and personal growth. My manager Narendra entrusted me and gave me a lot of opportunities to explore my interests and work on a wide array of things through which I gained a holistic understanding of our product. I had frequent check-ins, 1:1s with my team members, and gathered feedback on my work which helped me stay aligned with my vision. I was also given the floor to demo some of my work in a CloudHub Demo-Meet and it really put my work in the spotlight.
In addition to the projects, I got to experience the Salesforce culture by engaging in a ton of FutureForce events. I participated in 25+ Virtual coffee chats with Salesforce employees and fellow interns, attended 7 Executor speaker sessions, including one from Bret Taylor (our COO), a lot of fun events/games, AR team painting, and weekly virtual happy hours with my team. Salesforce strongly believes in giving back to society and organised volunteering events for interns to help give back to society. I volunteered my time in stitching a few masks to help with the pandemic, using a mask-making kit that was sent by Salesforce to all interns. Through these engagements, I met a lot of new people and heard their motivating career stories, I learned a lot about the company culture and all this made me realise why Salesforce has been named one of the World’s Best Workplaces by Great Place to Work for the third year in a row.
✔️ Three things I learnt in my journey ✔️
♠️ Life-Long Learning is the key — Right from the point when I entered the field of software engineering, I’ve been reminded of this time and time again. Throughout my internship, I had to pick up new skills/tech stacks in order to be productive and deliver on the tasks. There are a ton of advancements being done on a daily basis and one needs to engage in the process of life long learning in order to continue making an impact. I believe that the most valuable skill a SWE can possess in today’s world is the skill to pick up new skills quickly and I’m glad I got to exercise that successfully this summer.
♠️ Follow your Passion and Never Give Up — Passion and the attitude of Never-Giving-Up are two of the best things you can bring to the table as a SWE. Without sounding too clichéd let me try to explain that. I’ve first-hand experienced the power of following my passion and gut, and trust me there is nothing that feels better when you’re doing things that you’re passionate about. Throughout my internship, I was able to demonstrate my passion for this field and I received a lot of positive feedback on it from my team. In these past two years, I realised that bigger the impact you want to make with your work, more difficult the work is going to be and more failures you might face along the way. I’ve faced a lot of difficulties, a lot of personal failures and have had times when things didn’t go as planned but as I was passionate about it, I never had the option of giving up! I believe that this goes hand in hand with the first point I made about Life-Long Learning. It’s hard to devote your life to something if you’re not passionate about it. So I would end this point with this advice — find your passion (it’s never too late) and work towards it, it’ll do wonders!
♠️ Give Back — The thing about Salesforce that I love the most is that they genuinely care about giving back and that is apparent in their 1–1–1 model. This is something that was always important to me personally because I’ve been fortunate to have people in my life who have helped me immensely and without whom I wouldn’t be here today. So I always felt a personal urge to give back and help my fellow community. But it was through this internship and the in light of the pandemic that I really understood how impactful cumulative volunteering could be!
💙☃️ Thank you Salesforce Ohana ☃️💙
Every day at Salesforce was super productive, I got to learn and grow as an individual. I had fun presenting my work on the Futureforce Demo-Day to fellow interns and Salesforce employees. Coming out of this internship I definitely see myself a much better SWE than coming into it. I feel I was able to do justice to my V2MOM and hit all the goals I had set at the start of this journey.
I would like to extend a big thank you to everyone who has made this journey really successful- my manager Narendra, my trail guide Henry, my team-lead Terry, my recruiters Sarah, Alania, Ben, my teammates Nishant, Michael, Raja, the rest of the CloudHub, MuleSoft, Futureforce, and the Salesforce Ohana- It has been one magical experience!
I hope I left it better than I found it!
