Answer by Vishnu Jayvel:
I interned at Amazon India – Chennai during summer 2014.
In short:
I had a very good experience. It was fun and challenging.In detail:
Amazon has always been a dream company for me and I was so excited when I got an offer to intern in Amazon. I was working in Kindle Book Content team.Smart people everywhere :
Amazon is filled with smart engineers and anytime you roam around the office you could find a group of super talented people brainstorming about some interesting challenges. I was highly motivated by my co-workers everyday.Interns get challenging projects:
Your work at Amazon totally depends on the team you're on. My manager gave me a project that had good business value for Amazon and was expected to go for production soon. I was very excited by the thought that my project is going to impact millions of Kindle Book readers around the world, so I started to take ownership from the day one.I wanted to make the best use of my internship period at Amazon. I had periodic brainstorming and feedback sessions with my manager. I adopted Kanban flow (sorted the tasks into ‘todo’,’doing’ and ‘done’), a methodology for task management. This helped me to have reality checks and find my weaker areas.
Bias for action:
At Amazon, everyone is expected to figure out things on their own.
Right from the beginning of my internship, I was encouraged by my manager to make decisions on my own and proceed with my tasks. In fact I was not assigned a mentor and I had to directly report to my manager.He gave me complete freedom to make changes in the codebase. With great freedom, comes great responsibility. There were scenarios where I was ambiguous in choosing the right path. But as time went on, I got used to this. Thanks to Amazon, I improved my decision making sills.
Nice perks :
- Pretty good stipend
- Sodexo meal coupons
- 24/7 cab facility
Sometimes I went to the office at midnight to collaborate with my manager, who is based in Seattle. I got an Amazon cab anytime I wanted.
Flexible work schedule:
Employees can come in late, work from home, or leave early if they want to. I normally went to office at 11 in the morning. Since nobody monitored me, I had complete freedom. I felt very relaxed and could concentrate on my work without any pressure.Amazonians are very helpful:
I had two tasks assigned to me during my internship. For my 2nd task, I wanted to know about a feature in Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. After finding out that the SLO (San Luis Obispo) team was handling the service, I directly contacted the software development managers from SLO and they were so helpful in helping me clear my doubts regarding their service. As an intern, I was suprised to find them friendly and helpful.Very strict code review:
In Amazon, even if a single line of code is modified it must be reviewed by any of the team members before pushing it to the codebase. My manager reviewed all of my code. If I had made any mistake or if any of my code is unclear he will comment near the line that had issues and send me his review. He sometimes include smilies in code review. Who would do that? 🙂 He was a cool guy. Even though many of co-workers and my seniors told me that code review will be difficult and time confusing to handle, I actually found it interesting.Each and every line of my code was read. For a system that handles millions of books, it was necessary for the code to be as optimized as possible. Even a single unnecessary instruction has to be carefully pruned from the code before it is pushed to the code base.
Getting a return offer:
Interns are asked to fill self performance reviews, which is then looked by the mentor/manager, who also give feedback about the intern. This document plays an important role in the hiring decision.The mentor, manager, bar raiser, and HR are the decision makers.
Conversion from intern to full-time employee is purely based on your project and your work. This can fall into 3 cases:
- Pre-Placement Interview (PPI): If you have completed your project on time and if you have done a decent job, you will be given an oppurtunity to take a pre-placement interview, which will mostly comprise of 1 or 2 technical rounds. Amazon has a very high hiring bar and so the interviews will be mostly challenging.
- Pre-Placement Offer (PPO):If your manager is impressed with your work you might even get a direct offer without any interviews.
- Rejection: If your mentor/manager thinks that you are not up to Amazon standard, you will not be given a PPI. As far as I know, this is a very rare case. No one I knew during my internship got a direct reject.
Overall, it was an enriching learning experience. Amazon has groomed me as a good software developer. For me, coding is like casting magic spells and I am always excited to write code that impacts millions of people. I'm looking forward to going back to Amazon, and yes, I got a Pre-Placement Offer. 🙂
To know about my productive work habits during internship refer
Vishnu Jayvel's answer to What are the best ways to excel in a summer internship?
coding hangover 