How I got an internship at Atlassian?
A Blog by Pranitha Sridhar
Hello readers!! I am Pranitha, a pre-final year student pursuing B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT (ISM) Dhanbad. Being from a non-CS background, grabbing a technical internship was very challenging for me.
Managing both core subjects and coding was quite a hassle, but I somehow managed to sail through. In August 2021, I secured an on-campus internship offer from Morgan Stanley for the Summer Analyst role. Later, I kept trying for various off-campus opportunities which were open and succeeded in getting offers from Amazon, Atlassian, and Flipkart.
Through this blog, I will be sharing my interview experience with Atlassian. Do let me know if you want me to pen down other experiences too :)
Atlassian Interview Experience:
I have heard a lot about Jira and Trello, especially during the beginning of the Covid- 19. But never have I realized that they were the main products of an Australian start-up called Atlassian, which pays approximately 50+ LPA for SDE graduates. After attending two-three sessions and learning about its values and cultures, I was more impressed with the company.
Atlassian by partnering with Girlscript has come up with the Women in Tech Hiring Event in 2021. This opportunity was exclusively for women.
The eligibility criteria were:
Open for both the 2022 batch (SDE Full Time Role) as well for 2023 (SDE Intern)
CE/CS/EEE/ECE/Maths and Computing branches
CGPA >= 7
No active backlogs
How did I know & apply?
I came to know about this opportunity through one of the videos of Arsh Goyal. It was just another opening where I applied without hopes of getting it. It was just a Google Form, where we had to fill in all our details and attach our resumes. The application was rolled out around August end.
How did I prepare?
As I was already preparing for my on-campus internship drive, I still had a good touch over DSA and problem-solving. I prepared the important problems and algorithms from LeetCode and GFG. I followed the roadmap provided by my college seniors and solved questions from CodeForces, SPOJ (Sphere Online Judge), and CodeChef. Doing an internship where I built this app called “Register,” which now has 10K+ installs on Playstore, helped me a lot. The projects that I have created during various hackathons also gave me leverage over others.
Here’s the Playstore link to the application I built during my internship. You can also check out my GitHub profile here.
Round 1: Online Assessment
People who met the eligibility criteria got shortlisted and got mail along with the test link for the Online Assessment. It was scheduled for 16th September 2021. The OA was on HackerRank. Duration for the same was 90 minutes in which there were 4 Medium level questions. The questions were from arrays, implementation, bitwise operations, and strongly connected graphs. I successfully cleared all the test cases for all the problems.
Tips: You can prepare for this round only by giving as many contests as possible. Don’t worry about the rating much, but this will allow you to solve a problem under time constraints. Most importantly, upsolve the problems that you weren’t able to solve during the contest because that is how you learn.
Interviews:
Candidates who solved all four problems with all the test cases passed were only shortlisted for the interview round. We were informed of the shortlisting on the 20th of September and were intimidated about the interviews. There were two interviews in total, 1 hour each. Both the interviews were held on Zoom on the same day(25th September). Both of them were eliminatory.
Round 2: Coding Interview
My interviewer was an SDE-1. He graduated his college just a year earlier, so he was pretty cool. The conversation was so smooth that it just felt like I was giving a mock interview with my college senior rather than an actual interview.
The interview started with an introduction of both of us. Then, the interviewer looked into my resume and asked about my internship work and projects. I explained it for about 10 minutes. Later, we started with problem-solving.
The problem statement was a modified situation-based problem on arrays and unordered maps. Firstly, the interviewer expected me to clarify the necessary queries that I had. He waited till I came up with all three essential queries. Instantly, I came up with an approach with high time complexity. He asked me to code it. The interviewer asked if it could be further optimized. After a minute or two, I explained another approach with much lesser time complexity to him. He seemed satisfied with it. I coded the same, and we concluded the interview with my questions to him.
Tips: Practice DSA problems from platforms like Leetcode, GFG etc... I personally followed Love Babbar’s 450 DSA Sheet. Give mock interviews to boost your confidence before the actual interview. Practice writing clean code and explaining orally to yourself while typing the code.
Round 3: M & V Interview
M & V stands for Manager and Values Round. After the coding round was done, I got a mail that my following interview was after 1.5 hours. An Engineering Manager at Atlassian took this round. Here they covered two things:
i) Management and leadership skills
ii) If my values align with the company’s values or not
I was asked so many questions, literally so many!! I hadn’t even thought about such questions earlier, and they were unexpected. The questions were around: Where did I exhibit leadership skills, What was the most considerable construction feedback that I received and how did I react to it, How do I work as a team member, How do I respond in certain situations, etc... The whole point after all these is to answer all the questions honestly and confidently, no matter how trivial the experience may seem.
Tips: Before the interview, go through your projects well and try to explain them in the STAR (Situation-Task-Action-Result) method. Prepare answers for the frequently asked questions and the ones I mentioned above. Carefully, go through the company’s values and prepare and recollect an incidence where you have exhibited that value.
What’s next?
After the interviews were done, the results were soon sent on 1st October, congratulating me for getting through all the rounds of selection. About 15 people out of 20,000 got the internship offers through this WTech Hiring Event. I am excited to intern at Atlassian in May 2022 🤩.
Resources that I used:
- Arsh Goyal’s YouTube channel for information about various opportunities and openings.
- Love Babbar’s DSA 450 Sheet
- DSA Platforms: LeetCode, GFG (Apply Company-wise filter), InterviewBit
- Coding Problems (try to participate in contests and upsolve the problems later, will help in coding online assessments): Codeforces, AtCoder, SPOJ.
- Get to know about the company’s values and culture with the materials they provide
- CodeISM Resources
- Pramp for Mock interviews
Some tips from my side:
There were many things that I learned by making mistakes in my internship journey. So, I would like to take this opportunity and share some of them with you all.
- Some people may say that CGPA doesn’t matter, but it does. Though it is not necessary to have a good GPA, having a good one will undoubtedly benefit you. So try to maintain as high CGPA as possible.
- Prepare an excellent, impressive resume. Please don’t make it more than one page. Add links wherever possible and use bullet points in describing your project and experience.
- Participate in hackathons during your second year, as that can fetch you a reasonable, topic-based project, and if you secure a high rank, you will also be able to mention it under achievements.
- If you are positive that you will be shortlisted for the interviews, start giving mock interviews. It can be with batchmates, seniors, or websites(Pramp and Interviewing).
- Always ask clarifying queries after the problem statement is given. Also, keep two to three questions prepared to ask the interviewer after the interview. The questions can be related to the work they mentioned during the introduction, the role of the position you applied for, or the company in general.
- Most importantly, keep thinking out aloud. Do not be silent for more than a minute. Keep explaining to the interviewers what is going on in your mind so that they will have an idea about your approach and can correct you if it’s wrong.
- Write a clean code while typing and name the variables descriptively. Also, be strong with time and space complexity concepts. Be confident and answer whatever you know honestly.
