An Internship At A Startup

The pressure of finding an internship was intense.

Not just another box to check before graduation, although it was a box to check, where you interned and what you did often was a make or break for your degree and future.

Competition was fierce even for those at the top of the class, so those of us in the middle needed to get a bit more creative.

It was after my data structures class that my friend came running up to me with something he printed out.

This was it.

For me.

What was I looking at?

It was a job posting for a senior level accountant for a software company and it had the actual address of the company on it.

Smiling, I came to the same conclusion as my friend.

If they had the money to hire a senior accountant, they probably had the money for an intern.

But how to bypass the HR gate-keeping system that the search firm was using?

The building was off a long stretch of the highway, blocks and blocks of corporate buildings, the last one being a small square glass and steel building at the end of the street.

No signs, no corporate logo, just the address.

This was the place, but the parking lot and the building was empty.

I parked the car, walked across the landscaped path up the doors and tested them.

Locked.

Nobody inside, no visitor desk, just an empty lobby.

I pulled the letter out of my jacket pocked, turned it over a few times, and slid it under the door as hard as I could.

The air took it pretty far as it shot across the floor before settling in the center of the lobby.

That night I got an email just after midnight to come by the next day at 11.

There I was the next day standing at the doors to the building, dressed in my suit, laptop under my arm, everything just as it was yesterday only my letter was gone.

I just waited and waited, making sure not to check my phone or watch in-case somebody was watching.

Eventually the elevator lights in the lobby lit up and a man stepped out of the elevator.

Blue jeans, a blue button down shit, loafers, long hair, and an even longer beard.

He was friendly opening the door and invited my in to talk about an internship- he had gotten my letter from the day before.

Asking if I knew anything about the company, I was honest in my response and how I even found the place, which he seemed to find quite funny.

We rode the elevator up to the third floor and I followed him into his office, which was a large room with a concert grand piano in the center of the room.

As he started to play the piano he asked about a few of my projects, where I thought tech would be in a few years, and what I found intriguing about computer science. I worked into my responses questions about what the company did, what the software was, and how I knew I could contribute if given the opportunity.

Could I start Thursday?

Yes.

I got the tour and my badge from the founder early that Thursday morning.

The company had the entire building but most people were remote so I shouldn’t be surprised if I suddenly see somebody.

Kitchen, meeting rooms, exercise room.

My office.

My first office.

A bare room, with a single desktop computer and a workstation setup with an oversize chair.

Feel free to move anything around and set it up as I like.

My first task was to review old code from the code library.

There had been an update to the language, adjustments to the real time timing of the sensors that navigated space in real time. Code needed to be updated and checked against a new list of timing, line by line and documented.

Get to work.

I didn’t see anybody else for almost the first three months.

Occasionally there would be some cars in the parking lot.

I’d sometimes her muffled talking in some of the offices I passed.

Nobody was ever in the kitchen or gym.

What was constant was the piano playing from the third floor.

My plan was kaizen.

Set up a routine for reviewing an adjusting the code, and each week through that routine review more and more of the code so my metrics were always going up.

Month four was the first time I physically saw another person and it was quite a shock as I got used to working and moving in silence.

His name was Bill and he was one of the programmers on the team, a partner to the founder and he wanted to pull me in on a project to help him with a deadline. He explained the situation and asked if I thought it was possible to deliver in two weeks.

How was I so sure it was?

Because if it truly was impossible he wouldn’t’ be asking me to assist him.

My academic advisor was a bit surprised when I explained to him that I wouldn’t be attending class for the next two weeks, being able to arrange missing class if I made up the work and gave a presentation to the department and intern coordinators for the university on what I was working on. 

It seemed like a fair compromise, more so as I was ready for a fight on missing class, the only qualifier was that I would have to be mindful on certain things as they had me sign an NDA.

Bill didn’t talk much to me, but you could almost hear him talking to himself in his mind.

That those two weeks went fast for me, but probably agonizingly slow for him.

The room we worked in was on the top floor, the windows blacked out with black garbage bags taped to the windows. A single workstation which Bill sat at, and a camera suspended from a metal frame in the center of the room.

Parts of the floor were marked with blue tape, and I’d stand at different points as Bill worked on the computer.

He would sometime step out for a bit and I’d take over reviewing his code, checking numbers and generally going line by line unsure of what I was even looking for.

About halfway through the project the founder stopped by and asked Bill how we were getting along, his response was perfectly.

It was at a college reunion a few years later when my friend asked me how that internship every worked out.

I was there for four months mostly checking code, but I did get to work on an important project before the internship ended.

When it did end, the founder was happy it all worked out and that the project was delivered on time.

He gave me a choice either a cut check for the time I spent with the company, which was up to that point the most money I had ever seen in my life, or now having spent some time at the company, if I believed in what they were doing, a small token amount of equity in the company.

Did I want a payout or a passport?