Internships & Cooperative Education

I started working with Twitter as a Hardware Test Engineer Intern in the summer ‘11. The very first day at work was pretty overwhelming, since even a random person in the elevator recognized me as the new intern and spoke to me. I later figured that the social networking company has its social values right in its veins, it sends out new hire emails, so people who work for the company can quickly get to know new folks, and the newbies can feel at home and ease into working for twitter.  

I was a part of the Hardware Procurement, Qualification and assets management team, my job was to run tests on hardware, Research on IPMI and kernel data retrieved by their servers and deliver a report on relevance of each metric to the team. Effectively I was a part of a team that built and rolled out Twitter s fast expanding data center.  I also helped them build a custom hardware monitoring tool using scripts and also to qualify new hardware in the Lab.

Highlights of working at twitter are the quality of people you interact with on a daily basis. Twitter doesn’t hire great engineers, it hires great people. The joy and inspiration that you draw from working with such passionate people is immense.  My mentor was a person with numerous patents and had played a key role in building the datacenter at Facebook, I was awed with the time he gave to teach me and help me grow into the job role I was offered.  My co-workers had skillful, innovative, bold, and ingenious approaches to the hard engineering problems that Twitter faces, and the company supports them by providing a culture of trust and openness.

Every day at Twitter was an amazing experience in itself: the snack counter (made for the 8yr old in me), the delicious lunches, teatime, random rock band sessions, the opportunity to work and see the value that it is adding to the company on the big picture was thrilling. What is greater is seeing your work immediately affecting millions of  Twitter users across the globe.

The Fun things that happen at Twitter are plenty, home of Giants, AT&T Park was a few blocks away and interns were given free passes to be there. The Interns are beyond pampered at Twitter.  Apart from the stipend and the poster sessions, the special events like meeting with Angel Investor Ron Conway made us feel like the company was interested in our personal and professional growth. It was amazing to be a part of an organization that is so caring and honest. It does not happen in everywhere that you get to talk about your internship with the CEO. 

The downtown view from twitter office is pretty amazing; I used to often find myself working away with coffee and with full view of the city, as mist floated thru the lofty scrapers of SF.  That’s when I thought it sure as hell was the best place to work on this planet.  And By the way, funny incident, within a week  of interviewing I flew in to San Francisco, with a bag of summer  clothes, considering I was a quite used the scorching summer of Texas. The minute I got outside of SFO, It was really chilly and foggy, I then realized that SF was very cold in summers.  I had to shop for winter wear the very next day to support the misty cold mornings,well, like Mark Twain puts it, The coldest winter I’ve ever had, is the summer in san Francisco.