We wanted to take a few minutes on this Valentine’s Day to talk about something very special to us — our interns. Every May, 20+ college students descend on our Austin office to spend their summer learning about how engineering works in the “real world.” They are enthusiastic; they are excited to learn; they come from all over the US and Canada; they wear funny clothes, and we love them.
Interns at Indeed have a unique chance to work on real problems across many dimensions of software development. Not only are these projects challenging, they are critical to our business and impact millions of job seekers around the world. Recent intern projects include: instant search functionality for our resume search application, improving ranking algorithms based on analysis of very large data sets, and improving the performance of a distributed message delivery system.
We asked one of our Interns from last summer why she loved Indeed. Here’s what she had to say.
From Caroline Horn, University of Illinois Computer Science, class of 2013:
During my summer at Indeed, I worked on the resume team doing front-end development. My projects included creating a drag-and-drop UI for resume uploads, implementing an autocomplete feature in the resume builder, and designing a splash page to highlight Indeed’s edge over its competitors. Through these projects, I was given the chance to work with the codebase of a large-scale application, an opportunity that a college student does not come across every day. I worked heavily with Google Closure Tools, including the Closure JavaScript Library and the Closure Compiler. It was fascinating to learn more about all of the behind-the-scenes processes that go into keeping a site as huge as Indeed running regularly.
A main focus in front end development today is centered around the mindset of “how can I make this product even easier to use?” My projects attempted to answer that question while maintaining Indeed’s simple design aesthetic. Both the drag-and-drop and autocomplete functionalities contribute to smoothing out the job seeker’s experience when interacting with the site, and the splash page provides a nice segue for employers when searching for resumes.
The engineering culture at Indeed is a living, breathing example of the “work hard, play hard” mentality. The engineers expressed a passion for their work through their willingness and eagerness to answer questions, as well as in weekly tech talks showcasing various components of Indeed’s engineering foundation. As an intern, I was treated as a full-fledged team member and was encouraged to contribute my own ideas and opinions regarding the challenges that the team was trying to solve. One thing that especially stood out to me was the sincerely strong effort made by every single person at the company towards keeping the best interests of the job seeker in mind at all times. It’s easy to stay motivated about your work when you know that the end result will help thousands of people all over the world.
I love Indeed engineering because I love Indeed and I love engineering.
See more from our interns in Summer 2012
We’re updating the accompanying video. Please check back later.