My 2019 Summer Internship at Hackerrank, Bengaluru.
I had the opportunity to intern at Hackerrank, Bangalore during the summer of 2019 and in this blog, I’d like to tell you about my experience! For those of you who haven’t heard about Hackerrank, it is the market-leading technical interview platform to identify and hire developers with the right skills. It also has a community website where you can practice problems, solve challenges and become a better developer. It has offices in Mountain View, London and Bengaluru :)
Applying to Hackerrank
I heard about the internship opening from a friend and applied through their careers page. They hire two kinds of interns, Technical Content Engineers(TCE) and Software Engineering(SWE) Interns. The TCEs are responsible for curating and making problems on algorithms, data structures etc for Hackerrank while the SWEs work on DevOps, Back-end, Front-end etc. I applied for an SWE position and had an interview scheduled with the CTO of Hackerrank Harishankaran Karunanidhi. After the interview, he said they would get back to me and within a week I had an offer from Hackerrank. I was really excited to join!
The internship and the work culture
The internship started sometime in May and we were given an introductory session where all the interns set up their laptops and finished some formalities. The next day we were assigned tasks and mentors. We were also told and go to interact with the Sales team so we would get to know about how the sales work. This was really fun because as developers we often do not understand how customers buy our software or how the whole marketing and sales department works!
The best thing about Hackerrank is that there is no hierarchy, we never felt like interns, we were included in every event, discussion and could give our views and opinions freely. Moreover, we had a weekly meeting with Hari where we explained whatever work we did during that week to him AND also to all the other interns. This was really good as we could learn by listening to other interns as well. During the course of the internship, all the interns(10 of us) were put up in a hotel nearby the office. This helped us to foster great friendships and we helped each other grow technically by having many intellectual discussions. You can check out all the interns here.
What I learnt during my internship
The main tech stack of Hackerrank is ruby on rails and react. I had already worked on ruby on rails in my previous internship, so I got the opportunity to work on React and Redux. My mentor was Aakansha Doshi, who is a front-end developer. I learnt so much from her, from the basics to best practices, finding test-cases etc. She also gave me feedback at the end of the internship which I am grateful for. I also worked with Shiv Deepak from the Mountain View office. I worked on an interesting DevOps related task with him. This was also a good experience as I had never worked on DevOps before nor had any idea about it. Apart from the technical learning, I also learnt about stand-ups, teamwork, how to communicate effectively, test-driven development, to not be scared to ask for help but also ask for help only when we have tried enough.
Fun times…
Apart from work, we also had a lot of fun in the office. The office has a foosball table, table tennis room as well as Xbox. We would play foosball whenever we wanted to take a break, in fact on weekends, we would come to the office just to play! The office also has a very well-stocked pantry :P
Moreover, Hackerrank has tied up with KidsWhoKode and the office of HackerRank in Koramangala, Bengaluru is transformed into a classroom every Friday. Underprivileged students visit to learn to code and are taught by the employees of this tech company. The interns volunteered and took turns teaching the children. Also, the full-time employees go out of their way to teach the children!
Amazing summer came to an end…
All good things must come to an end and so did this internship. I learnt a lot and made great friendships. I would like to thank everyone at Hackerrank for making this one of the best summers of my life!
I would like to thank Ishani, Nalini and Kenny from the HR team for taking great care of us, and Hari, Aakansha, Shiv and so many others for the amazing technical experience! 😄
P.S — Highly recommend students apply for an internship.
Update: May 2 2021
This blog post has been published on the Hackerrank careers page. Thanks to Hackerrank for this gesture 😍 . Due to this, I get a lot of queries on social media. So I decided to add a new FAQs section below. (Caution: The process might have changed now, my answers are based on my 2019 experience.)
- How much time does Hackerrank take to reply to my application? ⏰
During my internship cohort, all the selected interns got a different response time. Some got replies in days, some in months. Hackerrank gets a lot of applications so be patient :)
- How is the interview process like?
There are two kinds of internships for CS folks. Technical Content Engineer(TCEs) and Software Engineer(SWE’s).
- TCEs had a data structure and algorithms round and SWE’s did not. The main responsibility of TCE’s is to create the problems and test cases that you see on hackerrank.com so it is only natural that they have this round.
2. For SWE interns, questions around past experience, resume and the technologies that you have used are asked. Make sure you know your resume in and out. Hackerrank really values your work more than the traditional interview style. For example: If you have worked on React, expect questions on React. If you have done backend projects, expect questions on the design decisions that you made.
- What are the criteria to get shortlisted? 🏆
There are no official criteria as such. However, according to my personal observations, in my cohort, all the TCE interns had qualified for ICPC regionals and were really good at data structures and algorithms. All the SWE interns had open-source experience or had done awesome projects.
- Was it on-campus or off-campus?
As far as I know, Hackerrank does not recruit on-campus. It was through the careers page i.e off-campus.
- What is the procedure for applying?
Go to career page ▶️ Look for Internship Opening ▶️ Click Apply
- When do applications open?
I don’t know 😢 Keep checking the page regularly or follow their social media channels.
- What did you work on there? 🖥
I worked on backend and DevOps. They have many teams, I am sure you will find something that interests you!
- How is the technical work?
Challenging and Interesting. Expect to learn a lot and learn fast 😄
- How is the work-life balance and culture?
Awesome. The culture and work-life balance are one of the best I have experienced. Everyone is kind, friendly and helpful 💚
Please leave a comment if you have more queries ☁️
