Hi everyone —
I’m extremely grateful that I have the chance to connect with you. My internship this summer starts 6/1 and I’m close to finishing up. Unlike many people, under pre-COVID condition I would have gone to work at Indianapolis, IN for Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Long story short — I got this opportunity from Grace Hopper ’19. I interviewed with many companies and because of my previous internship at another CRM company (start-up), I just really liked Salesforce/CRM company for some reason.
What is a Salesforce
(Marc Benioff was) … the father of cloud software as a service…
Really? I don’t think anyone just learning CS at school would know these: SaaS? PaaS? Cloud?
I’m a SWE Intern at Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This cloud automates the marketing campaign, and this cloud specifically was formerly ExactTarget. You can still see ET’s culture and its influence. It was, and still is, one of the most powerful email sending agents. With the help from Einstein (AI Cloud/research part), Marketing Cloud can send people push emails, push notifications on SSM at the best time of the day (betting people will open it), and with the best content possible.
The part of org I’m in is called Messaging & Journeys. That is the gateway for clients of Salesforce to create their customized campaigns.
Salesforce is a B2B company, meaning they make money to have big names companies pay to open accounts on SFDC, trust them with their data, and hopefully (continue to) make big bucks base on the powerful software Salesforce provides.
All Work + Still All Play ( I hope :)
…and I just didn’t get an intern project…
My team specifically, is pretty new. It’s put together to help with the initiatives of transitioning away from the big old monolith application Marketing Cloud was running on. This requires many mitigation and tactics of getting other teams to be onboard with the microservice platform that the team was building.
Now we gotta understand another part, which is that like many companies, Salesforce is moving to a Public Cloud solution. They’ve overgrown that balance sheet where they can still maintain first party data centers. This means they’re gonna have to say “hey AWS and Azure, we tried, but nah, this is just too much work. Let’s just be friends and let me have all my stuff stored on the nice little storage you got for me”.
Now that’s easy to understand, isn’t it? But it’s not gonna work if we just dump our working application in the monolith to Azure. Monolith applications aren’t designed to run on public clouds. Migrating as is will cause severe security risk, and no sane company will actually do that.
Containerizing stuff is the way to go here. Put your code in a docker container, a VM, or something that will literally keep your code running. Have many instances of it, and put it on any public cloud of your choice. Put a load balancer on it. And we can keep our hands off the wheel (for the most part).
I work with docker and kubernetes in languages like C# .NET GO and of course lots of shell scripts. I knew none of them beforehand. I started learning them on Day1. Looking back, I should’ve started sooner.
O. K . That was a lot. But as an intern I was not told to work on some chat bot or dashboard. I was expected to actually work on the team and figure these grand things out. I love that. It’s so cool and trendy. I really don’t think I can get this experience anywhere else.
Things happen
just like year of 2020
Yeah I love my manager. But re-org happened and we had to say goodbye. That sucked. A LOT. I’m still trying to get over how to be a professional engineer. Yet the reality is, often time, I am not. I’m still a student and an intern who probably needs a lot of hand-holding.
I learned that if your manager doesn’t care about you, the company probably doesn’t too. If a manager just cares about numbers and performance, that’s not a good sign. If you’re not growing as an individual (could be a product owner, scrum master, APM, engineer, people manager, sales…).
Salesforce has a very cool structure where the team manager is probably not the most senior person on the team. People managers could have developer background, but they also provide career development resource and make sure people get what they need to do their jobs.
Good managers listen and they try their best to understand you as a person. More importantly, they try to grow you as a person.
I’m just an intern though
The only guarantee is that I will try to keep an open mind and ask the best questions I can ever ask. I think that’s more important than anything. If your manager and mentor don’t satisfy your appetite, go find someone else outside your team. Schedule 1–1 with people, even way above your level: how cool will it be to tell people you interned at _a_company and you talked to the CEO there! My advice is to go vertical and horizontal at the same time.
Climb up the management chain and start escalating your professional talking skills (is that even a thing?) and ask bigger picture things. It helps you understand what your building and why you’re building it a certain way. Go beyond your org and ask about the positions that sound super cool (like Solution Engineer). Building your network is probably just as important as getting a return offer. They’re gonna be the first mentors you’ll have in the industry, and yes, the adult world.
I’ll skip the whatever lunch and learn & oh look at my swag part. They paint rosy picture of a company and would almost be considered universal. Companies compensate people one way or the other, as long as you’re compensated well enough and you’re enjoying what’s on your plate, do it.
My takeaway is there are many good companies out there. Maybe FAANG is cool. But working for Salesforce got me thinking a lot more like a proper engineer too. SF also has a unique culture that’s hard to describe. Very people/culture centric. As an intern/full-time you’ll get 56 hr/year to volunteer (called VTO). You can utilize it anyway you want. This is great because I actually do things like that on the side, so it’s cool that I can just be trusted enough to do my work & work on something else meaningful.
Company value is something. It’s something that’ll affect you daily. Do people like to communicate in this company? How do they communicate? Are they helping you anyway they can? What does your manager talk to you about?
I think many people would be sleeping fine at night even if they work for companies have questionable moral values. I think I would too. Well, if I have a choice, I’d still try to work for the good side of the Marvel Universe.
Oh well.
I’m just an intern. And I’m just a 21 year old. I don’t know how far I can go in the technology industry, in corporate America, or just in life. So let me know if I said something you feel you could resonate, or something you disagree with. I’ll update this article if I have a return offer by the end of my internship. Share if you like it, I don’t really care.
