Tomas Ye
Internships at Amazon: Why Are They so Cool?
Spoiler, it is not the high salary or the fancy tech…
First things first, let me blow you away with some Amazon trivia. As of spring 2020, Amazon is the 3rd most valuable company in the world by market capitalisation. It is also recognised as a member of the FAANG group of most prestigious tech companies and is ranked among the most desirable employers around the globe (especially for tech nerds like me). However, if you still need a reason to consider submitting an “Internship at Amazon” query in the LinkedIn search, continue reading.
What to expect from this article?
Before we begin, let me state that my point of view is biased in two fundamental ways.
Firstly, I currently work for Amazon and I have been subjected to the necessary corporate conditioning. Naturally, at the time of writing, I believe that Amazon is the best company in the world and the following paragraphs will reflect this belief.
Secondly, as a software engineer, the “wisdom” contained here applies best to people at technical positions, like software engineers and data scientists. That being said, judging based on my interactions with other Amazonians, I am quite confident that interns occupying other positions at Amazon (business analysts, product managers, recruiters etc…) would also identify with these lines.
My hope is to give the reader a taste of what the highlights of working at Amazon can be like and, maybe, converting a few non-Amazonians into Amazonians.
Now that you are all psyched up, let me present to you the number one reason why internships at Amazon are so cool.
1# reason = Interns have Impact
To make my point clear and unambiguous, let me first precisely define what I mean when I say “Interns have Impact”. Later, I will make a case for why interns at Amazon actually enjoy great impact.
What is meant by “Interns have Impact”?
I mean that the work that you do as an intern matters. I mean that after you finish the internship, you will have a feeling of: “Damn, I really made a mark here with my ABC project that brought important XYZ results.” Concretely, in the case of software engineers, I mean that you work on production systems and the code that you deploy brings value and affects the company’s bottom line in some way.
Now that we agree on what Impact is for an intern, I would like to point out that it should NOT be taken for granted. Not every internship position comes with great impact potential and some companies are better than others at offering impactful internships.
For example, prior to Amazon, I was doing an internship at another fancy tech corporation (SAP). The work that I was doing during this internship consisted mainly of tasks similar to:
- Fixing bugs in legacy components
- Writing unit tests for someone else’s code
- Tech debt that needed to be done but no one wanted to do.
In other words, no one apart from my direct engineering colleagues cared much about what I was doing. Do not get me wrong, I actually enjoyed the internship quite a bit. The company culture was great and I had a lot of fun there with the other interns. My teammates were very knowledgable and nice enough to teach me their trade. I learnt a great deal about coding and general software engineering from them and I am very thankful for that.
I just wanted to share this example to show how an un-impactful, yet meaningful and ultimately successful, internship looks like.
So, how does an impactful internship look like?
Giving myself as an example again, at the beginning of my internship at Amazon, I was asked to modify a program which governed an important business process. I was soon to discover, how important the process actually was…
When I was done with my changes, I deployed my solution to the production environment and started playing around with it to see if my modifications work as expected. Very soon after I started testing, I received a bunch of emails and IMs full of fear and confusion from people I have never heard of.
It turned out that my new feature triggers a mission critical database task that was supposed to run only once a day. My repetitive testing caused corruption of a crucial database and the business people consuming the data downstream were worried that this corruption might result in serious monetary losses for the company.
Thankfully, everything turned out to be alright as we quickly restored the database into the expected state.
Nevertheless, it was an interesting experience to see that my product could wreck such a havoc that people much higher in the company hierarchy noticed immediately. Not so sexy…
However, I soon learnt that it works the other way around as well. When you work on big value producing systems that a lot of people depend on, you have potential to cause big positive impact with a few carefully placed lines of code.
Seriously, the bang for buck ratio of your code increases dramatically with the importance of the original component. For instance, consider that with a couple of clever lines of Python or SQL code, you can optimise a critical computation for, let’s say, the way packages are being routed through a logistics network. If you manage to achieve a very modest improvement, with your code, let’s say 0.001 $ per package shipped, given that a logistics company like Amazon ships billions of packages every year, your code is now saving millions of dollars annually. Now that is impact and it feels good!
Additionally, when you build something that actually works, is used and brings value, the same people that were scared and angry with you before, when your software was causing problems, are now sending you words of praise and gratitude. This also feels good.
So, we see that working on impactful projects is a double edged sword. When you are reckless, you can cause significant harm. However, if you are smart and patient enough, you can make big things happen. In other words, you have the ability to both create and destroy. Or, as great philosopher once said (Uncle Ben from Spiderman, by the way)
“With great power comes great responsibility”
What about other interns at Amazon?
From my experience working at Amazon, no matter who you are, your work matters. Whether you are an intern, a fresh out of college new joiner or a hot shot tech lead with years of experience under your belt, you are considered a valuable member of the team and are treated as such.
The fascinating thing I observed while working at Amazon is that this tendency to assign high value and high priority work to new joiners, and even interns, is not an exception, but a rule. New interns do not go through months of learning the job on second hand tasks that no one really cares about before touching something useful.
A common practice for on-boarding new interns in my current team and other tech teams across Amazon goes something like this:
A new intern gets between one to two weeks to look around and familiarise themselves with the way software is built in Amazon, the particular problem that the team is solving and the concrete software components the team owns. After that, they are thrown head first into a rolling mission critical project.
This is done, by design, to push them far outside their comfort zone. The projects are complex and utilise a wide technological stack. The intern will get confused, frustrated and will doubt their own capabilities. To solve the problem, they will have to be humble enough to reach out for help to their teammates and absorb information quickly and effectively.
They will be stressed about the deadline but, at the same time, they will be hesitant to push their changes to production because they fear breaking something. The first task will be gruesome and, in some cases, it will shatter a bit the grandiose image the intern had of them selves before (been there…).
But, if they succeed, then they are golden. They are now a functioning member of the team. They are ready to be presented with a new problem, figure out a solution, write the code, deploy it and, finally, make impact.
The next assignment will be even harder and more important, but they are now confident that they will nail it. After all, the first assignment seemed impossible, yet they somehow managed to deliver. That is how we transform fresh out of school newbies into pragmatic and productive contributors at Amazon.
If you think about it, it is actually aligned with one of Amazon’s core leadership principles, namely the principle of “Delivering Results”. Interns at Amazon are expected (just like any other Amazonian) to deliver tangible results. Moreover, it is based on these results and the added value to the business these results produce that full time contracts are offered back to them.
Conclusion
Now you know what is so cool about internships at Amazon. It is not the company brand, the fancy tech nor the employee benefits. Although all of theses count and are there, in my opinion, the coolest feature of an internship at Amazon is the potential for big impact. The possibility to leave a mark, to say to your friends something like: “Your Amazon packages are being delivered faster because of me.”
However, as discussed above, just like everything meaningful in life, potential for big impact comes with a price. In this case, the price is potential for big harm which ultimately results in more stress and demand for high standards.
With impact it is a high risk / high reward style trade-off and, if an impactful internship appeals to you, you should ask yourself whether the price for big impact is worth it. For me, it absolutely is. For you, only you can decide.
If you decide that the trade-off is, indeed, worth it for you as well, then you might consider browsing the available internships at Amazon here.
Thank you for reading my article!
Have a nice day
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Tomas Ye
Gymnast, Mathematician and Software Engineer at Amazon
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