I interned at Amazon Development Centre (Hyderabad) for 5 months at the start of 2017 while I was in my 8th Semester. In my 7th Semester, I had been trying hard to secure an internship in some startup or corporate. Amazon was in my wish-list because I had friends who had interned there during the summers and had awesome things to say about the experience. During December 2016, I was contacted by a recruiter for an intern position after a senior had referred me for an Intern position. After a couple of rounds of interview, I got selected for a position in Amazon’s Hyderabad campus. I was really happy because Hyderabad was a city I was familiar with and I had a few friends interning there. After doing a little bit research about my team, I got to know I would be working with the Amazon Home Services team. Back then I never knew Amazon was into such a business line for selling services to customers and I thought it to be pretty interesting.
Fast-forward to the start of the internship, Amazon had arranged for our travel and had given us a 15 day stay at a 5-star hotel. I had a lot of friends who were also interns and were staying in the same place, hence this was one hell of a fun ride. Every day we would wake up early, enjoy the sumptuous breakfast buffet. This is where I met a lot of other co-interns who also were interning with Amazon Home Services (AHS). And I also met others interning from all sorts of teams like Amazon Payments, Amazon Transportation, Amazon Fulfilment, etc.
On day 1, there was a briefing for all the interns about the Amazon Culture in general. Amazon takes a lot of pride in their culture and hence these sessions spanned for the entire day. People were invited to share their experiences and it was wonderful to see how people grew from being Interns to Principal Engineers at Amazon. We were given a small diary which is pretty symbolic and has the infamous quote “It’s Still Day 1” which is Amazon’s philosophy to always continue having the same enthusiasm throughout the journey as if it’s the first day. There were also the mention of the famous Amazon Leadership Principles which continues to be the keys for succeeding at Amazon.
We were then given instructions to collect our laptops and other accessories. Most interns got a new MacBook. I then went to the designated area to meet my team and manager. At this point my senior manager mentioned that the team had gone on a weekend trip to Goa and decided to extend their stay. In my mind, I was thinking that what an awesome group of people they must be to have such trips. At the same time feeling unlucky about missing the trip by a small margin. Nevertheless, the MacBook kept me busy for the rest of the evening.
The next day I met all of my team members and was introduced to my manager and mentor. My manager (who I still work with) was just about 6 years elder to me and had been an intern at Amazon. In fact it was fun to know that most of my team members had been ex-Interns at Amazon before starting out as full timers. Overall, it was a pretty young team with the eldest member being about 8 years older than me.
Since I was to intern for about 5 months, my manager and mentor had worked out a plan for a bunch of tasks that I will do based on my progress. My first task was a commit that got deployed to Amazon’s Retail Website. At the time I felt a bit shocked that the team trusted me with coding something that was to be deployed onto the production website as my first task.
However I was quick to realise that over here there was no real difference between an intern and a full-timer. There was no difference between a new member and a tenured member. As an individual you are responsible for certain things and people expect you to be in terms with it.
Amongst all the perks, Amazon was generous enough to provide interns with the same amount of facilities as a full time employee for boosting productivity. With just a button click you can get the hardware you need. And there are multiple self service vending machines for other peripherals like mouse/keyboard/headphones. I experimented with multiple sets of monitors to see what suits me. The two monitors arrangement continues to be my favourite till date and I still use this arrangement.
Overall I was happy with my first task and felt good about completing the same. I also got introduced to the strict code reviews and testing procedures that are kept in place to ensure faulty code does not leak into production. Days passed by and I kept reading more and more internal documentation and go about doing my tasks. As I got closer to my team-mates, we would go out for ad-hoc fun sessions like Go-Karting, Dinners, X-Box matches, Poker sessions and streaming cricket matches. This really helped to break the ice with some of the senior members of the team who intimidated me because of their sheer knowledge and experience.
Coming back to my internship, Amazon Home Services had 5 interns including me. All of us belonged to different colleges and were part of different sister teams. We would regularly meet to discuss how it’s going for each other and often poke fun around not being able to understand a lot of internal documentation and processes. We went on a trip to watch an IPL match with the entire organisation. Below is a picture of that day with the fellow interns Ashutosh, Nirmal, Manya Setia and Arushi Garg who continue to be good friends of mine.
Overall the first 3 months of my internship was pretty easy-going and was the ramp up phase where we just got used to all the processes for deploying code into production. I also got a lot of free time to work on a couple of side projects that I was pursuing from college. By the end of 3 months, I was already given my main project which required me to independently do some designing, all the implementation and rolling out to production. As the end of my internship approached, my work hours increased. I still cherish this phase because at times the entire office would be empty and only the interns would be there working on their tasks. I would plug in my head phones and just loved this phase because of the sheer amount of code I was writing and deploying to production. Back then deploying code to production gave me an adrenaline rush. Below is a picture of me in the last week of my internship writing those unit tests for covering each branch. One of the interns sneaked in to capture this picture and I am lucky to still have it. We still have a good laugh about these times.
In the last couple of weeks my manager and mentor also explained to me the conversion process from Intern to full time. The process was pretty simple. It required each intern to document in a template all the tasks they have worked on and the milestones they have met. Post an initial evaluation and feedback from peers, the manager discusses with a Bar Raiser on the conversion decision. And post that a hiring decision is made. Sometimes a few candidates are required to do additional 1 or 2 round of interviews. I completed all my documentation and completed the exit formalities. Usually all interns are told about their hiring outcome by the last date, however in my case it was delayed and I was told to wait a while due to some last minute crunch.
My teammates organised a wonderful farewell. Over the past 5 months there was a personal connect that each of us had developed. Since the Amazon Home Services organisation was a 45 member team back then, the feeling was that of a start-up within the massive Amazon Corporate. The farewell tradition comprised of a speech by the outgoing interns and questions asked by our peers to embarrass the shit out of us. I met a bunch of super smart folks with whom I connected with not just from work perspective but also from a personal point. I was not sure if I would convert and join back as a full timer. Hence, with a pinch of uncertainty I ended my internship.
I ended the internship on a Friday. On Saturday I returned back to my home-town. On Monday morning when I woke up (first working day post I left), I had an email from the recruiter conveying that they were extending a full time offer to me. I was really happy and more than that I had a lot of respect for the team, the recruiter and the company for getting back to me with the result so swiftly. I breathed a sigh of relief and that marked the end of my Amazon Internship.