Ukrainian student interned three times at Google: the guy shared tips on how to qualify for a corporation

Markiyan Valyavka, after four years at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), is undergoing an internship at Google for the third time. The first was remote due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the second was in Zurich, Switzerland, and the third was in London. He told the publication DOU about how his internship is going and how to get such an opportunity in one of the tech giants of the world. Next - from the first person.

Photo: IStock

How it all began

I am from Lviv. He studied at the classical gymnasium, then entered the UCU with a degree in Computer Science. I got acquainted with computers in kindergarten. Dad always picked me up from there earlier, so I spent a lot of time with him at work, surrounded by computers. I played games, searched for information on the Internet, studied.

Later I took various programming courses. The tasks were easy for me, but the way the information was presented was uninteresting. The real passion for programming appeared at the university. Then I began to like computer science.

After my first year at UCU, I spent the summer of 2020 solving problems on LeetCode. He also sent applications to IT companies to get his first internship.

In addition, I applied for the Google STEP (Student Training in Engineering Program) program, a 12-week internship for first and second year undergraduate students interested in computer science. In total, the duration of an internship at Google can vary up to 17 weeks.

That same summer, I was selected for my next internship, which began in July 2021. My first experience with Google was exciting, even though due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was working remotely with the team based at the company's headquarters in Europe (in Zurich, Switzerland). Interestingly, for work, they sent me a laptop by mail to Lviv. I also bought a comfortable table, a lamp and other equipment for working in comfortable conditions with the company's funds.

At STEP, I worked on a common project with an intern partner. Our project turned out to be useful to other teams, so later we teamed up with two interns from London and continued to work with the four of us. The experience of combining teams is atypical for Google, usually this does not happen.

During my internship, I dealt with the backend and was part of the SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) team. Our job was to keep the software running, test it after incidents, and identify anomalies to quickly fix issues.

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By the way, an incident usually occurs when the SLO (service-level objective) is violated. An SLO is a well-defined "goal" that relates to a particular service. For example, “Over the past month, 90% of requests to Service A complete in less than 300 milliseconds.”

It may happen that during a period of special loads, say around the New Year, service “A” receives too many requests and starts returning them after a long time (say 10 seconds) or the service “falls” altogether. This event can be classified as an incident.

All SLO metrics are monitored and recorded in real time. If we then look at the latency value for the period covering the New Year, on the graph we will notice a large jump in the indicator to 10 seconds - this is an anomaly.

In practice, if a certain service, say in Asia, stops working, the responsible Site Reliability engineer is pinged on a pager and must quickly fix everything. But when one service fails, others associated with it can also fail. There may be hundreds of services, and we need to find the one that caused the problem (this is the so-called root cause analysis). This was the idea of ​​our project with the team - to help SRE engineers quickly find the root cause of the problem and resume services without image or financial damage to the company.

Specifically, I wrote an anomaly detector that monitored latency jumps, errors per second and other parameters, and also created reports on significant deviations. This automation will save a lot of time for the SRE, which will not need to manually look for the anomaly.

"90% success in an interview depends on skills"

After applying for an internship at Google, you must go through a selection process that includes an interview. According to my observations, 90% of success in an interview depends on your own skills and only 10% on luck. Of that 90%, I believe 50% is technical qualifications and 40% is communication skills.

During the interview, it is important to avoid long pauses, even if the answer to the question does not appear immediately. I recommend speaking your mind out loud during the problem solving process in an interview. I practiced the same technique when I trained on LeetCode - I didn’t just complete tasks, but imagined that I was telling a real person about the whole process.

Of course, you need to know English in order to communicate effectively with the interlocutor. In addition, before the interview, you should research the company in order to ask relevant questions from your side. I prepared a whole list of such questions in Google Docs: I was interested in what the working day is like in the company, how teams are organized in Google, how communication occurs between them, and so on.

Second internship at Google

To get into a second internship in 2022, it was enough to get a positive feedback from the host - the manager of the previous project. Sometimes an additional interview may be required.

Under the same procedure, it is quite likely to receive a job offer, but this is possible only after graduation from the university. Google does not offer jobs to students who are in the process of pursuing higher education, and actively encourages them to get a diploma.

The selection for an internship is quite long. Reviewing feedback from a previous project takes four to six weeks. An admissions committee, made up of expert volunteers within Google, reviews the code you've written before, the design of the ongoing project, and the previous manager's feedback.

Next, a list of candidates for an internship is formed, from which internal teams choose their interns. Usually they conduct the so-called hostmatching interview, where you talk about your own experience, and the team about your current project. After that, both the intern and the manager communicate their decision to the recruiter. If they match, then the trainee joins the team.

My second internship took place offline in Zurich and covered a completely new technology stack. This time I was working on the frontend, which required learning a lot of new technologies, including Angular and TypeScript.

“Most of my time is taken up by the design itself”

In May 2023, I returned to Google as an intern and joined the SRE team in London. By the way, for the first time the term SRE, or site reliability engineering, was introduced by Google, describing it as "an approach to operations when you treat them as if it were a software problem." SRE's job is to ensure the reliability, scalability and uninterrupted operation of IT systems.

My task is to create and deploy a project from scratch using the Go programming language. This will be a system that collects and analyzes information about the goals that SREs want to support and the goals that require their immediate attention. So we can balance these processes in the most efficient, "healthy" way.

The main time of my work is occupied by the design itself, and not by the implementation of the project. To do this, I need to study a large amount of internal documentation, technologies, processes and make a specific proposal: building a project, testing, uploading artifacts to a repository, deploying software, and so on. I have 14 weeks to complete.

The next goal after the internship is to get a full-time offer from Google. However, given the current situation with global staff cuts, this can be a challenge. It's unclear what the hiring process will be like during this time, as after layoffs, companies often restrict new hires for a certain period.

Google is a great career start. This is the company where you can learn something. Here you are given time, access to the course database and internal expertise. As an engineer trainee, I had many learning opportunities. In addition, the company may sponsor part of your education, even a master's degree. Google is very interested in the development of its employees.

The corporate culture is built in such a way that you can schedule a coffee meeting with virtually anyone. For example, if you are passionate about how someone creates presentations or gives public speaking, you can easily meet and directly ask how he does it. Even if this person holds a high position and has a team of 300 employees, he will be open to communication.

In addition, Google organizes many activities to strengthen team spirit: we went hiking in the mountains, on lakes, and organized barbecues to build closer and more trusting relationships.

Another feature that appeals to me is the No Heroes policy at Google - the company does not encourage competition, race for promotions and overtime, and tries to ensure a perfect work-life balance, where everyone can develop in a team and have enough time for their own affairs.

"I have met people whose approach to life has been a great inspiration to me"

In fact, the internships, especially the last two, had a significant impact on my vision for my future career. In my freshman year, I knew that I wanted to do something related to computer science. But I wasn’t sure in which company, in what position and how I want to develop - to a greater extent it is communication with people or programming is preferable.

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At Google, I met people whose approach to life and career has been a great inspiration to me. I see how they go about their business every day and how they build their lives.

Now I understand that in the future I want to work with people and develop as a team manager, become a mentor for other employees.

During the second internship, I became interested in the atmosphere of Zurich - a small city surrounded by mountains and rivers, where no one is in a hurry to go anywhere. Now, compared with him, London seems huge and crowded, although many come here because of his majesty. For me, there is too much chaos.

I never imagined that at 21 I would be working at Google in London. Therefore, the most important advice I can give is not to be afraid to realize your most ambitious dreams. Try and believe in yourself. Things don't always work out, and that's okay. It only needs to happen once.

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