Hello all. I'm asking for a friend who has an swe internship at Microsoft. His team gave him some potential choices on his internship projects. And he is seeking for some collective wisdom in helping him choose a project that will maximize his chances of a return offer. One project has a specific outcome to achieve and the other project is open-ended. The open-ended project could potentially result in a non-working solution but this project will not be evaluated on completion but rather holistically. What are your thoughts on these two internship projects? Which one should he choose? Thank you in advance. Edit: One more question. Are depth or breadth oriented projects better?
Also depends on what your goals for the internship are. Do you want to learn a certain tech stack and build something cool, develop general engineering and pm skills, network, something else? All else equal I'd go with the open ended project. It will be more like real engineering. An intern project shouldn't be like a homework assignment with a concrete spec. That's not what the real world is like. I always see interns treating their projects like a problem set where someone else should have defined all the bounds, but you can impress your manager a lot and learn more by diving in to a problem area and figuring out what's worth doing and how it could be done.
I agree that an opened ended project wpuld resemble real world swe work would be like. However, this friend just really wants to make sure that he gets a return offer. As such, he is having a hard time deciding on a project.
Doesn’t matter just work hard and you’ll surely get it
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You can make a poll. Assuming each project is equally interesting, I would personally go for the well defined project. The open ended project might require lots of speaking with stakeholders and aligning incentives, which takes time. And you only have 12 weeks in the internship so you are on a time crunch. And if the open ended project ends up being not useful, then you don’t really have much impact to show at the end, which is a problem For the well defined project, you can also make stretch goals with your manager, during the first week. If that’s what you want
Added a poll per your advice. Thnx.
Would your prefernce change if there was no speaking with stakeholders/aligning initiatives. E.g. gets given an open ended questions like optimize X given Y.