This post summarizes my 2016 internship experience at IBM Dublin, from June to September 2016.
TLDR; That was awesome! 👏
Extreme Blue is the internship program proposed by IBM. As they currently write on their website, There are internships, and then there’s Extreme Blue™.I agree, I did a few internships and Extreme Blue was … different. I think it’s a good summary to say that Extreme Blue is an internship program, but it’s not the same as being “an intern” at IBM.
An intern in a company, from my previous experiences, is like being a full-time employee except that you don’t have the same expectation in terms of work, you’re here to learn first, and the time is generally limited, 3 to 6 months.
With Extreme Blue you don’t necessarily work on an IBM product/project, it’s more a project especially thought for this program. You’re only with other interns, as opposed to my other internships where I was part of a team with other full-time employees.
My goal/dream was always to work in Tech in Silicon Valley.I knew that as a French, it is possible but the solutions are limited. For this internship period, I applied at a lot of places but didn’t even pass the resume step at other big tech companies. I knew that a big name like IBM would help me in the future to at least have an interview.
I ended up interviewing with two companies, IBM and Earny, and received offers from both of them. My role at Earny was about being one of the first engineers of the startup, and TLDR of what Earny is doing is “Earny’s app gets your money back on purchases after prices drop”.Earny is based in Los Angeles and was in a Startup Incubator in Santa Monica.
I had a hard time to decide, both companies seemed to have equally interesting projects! On one hand, Earny was located in Los Angeles, which would bring me closer to my Silicon Valley life, on the other hand IBM was a big name and would possibly either bring me to the US or at least add a valuable name on my resume.
As you can guess, I hope, I ended up choosing IBM. 🥳
The process for Early was a few phone calls with the founders, some technical calls but nothing too complex, more high level than code.
The process for IBM was more similar to what we can expect from a tech company, with some online coding interviews, etc. Overall, it was waaaaay easier than any of my following Google/Uber/etc interviews because it was less coding and more of everything.For instance, I had a managerial interview, a coding design challenge to do at home where I had to design/architecture a video game, some coding exercises, and finally a skype live coding interview. But still, easier than Google.
Extreme Blue has a program in a few cities in Europe/US, but I think I only applied for the Dublin program. I don’t know why only Dublin, maybe at the time I didn’t realize they had other cities.I was excited because Dublin is Dublin 🇮🇪, the city of 🍻and live music 🎶! (At the time I was still drinking beers)But most importantly excited because I would improve my English! I was so bad in English, really bad, and I knew it was a requirement for my career in Software Engineering.