How I Failed to Get An Internship at Yandex

This happened after my 3d year at University (out of 5) in April 2013. Since the 4th year workload at Uni was supposed to be decreasing, so I applied for an internship position at Yandex, because, of course, I wanted to get a job at the most famous (at least inside the country) Russian IT company.

The process looked like this: you applied on the website leaving your contact information and then they emailed you the list of the tasks for different positions. You were supposed to select a position you want to apply to and email back your solution in two weeks.

The task wasn’t very difficult. It required you to implement a very standard thing, but in a way that allowed you to demonstrate your OOP knowledge. Unfortunately, I didn’t save my code so I can’t laugh at myself and see how bad my solution actually was. I remember that the task stated: “You shouldn’t spend more than 4 hours to get it done”.

Well, what happened next? I didn’t hear back, I never even got a rejection letter. Although it’s undoubtedly a very bad job from Yandex (please-please-please always send rejection letters), I didn’t deserve to get an internship this time.

Here are 3 lessons one could learn from this story.

Several weeks after the deadline I talked to my friend Artem and found out that we applied for the same position but he got an interview. I started asking questions about his solution to understand what I did wrong. Our approaches didn’t differ that much (I said that it was quite a standard thing), except for one major thing. Artem said: “My solution had documentation and thorough tests. Did you have all that?”. Well, I didn’t. I asked: “Did you really spent only 4 hours?” The answer was “of course, not”.

So the first lesson is always make sure to show your best work, even if it takes much more time than expected by the company.

The second lesson is that if you didn’t get back from the company, ask them. Now it seems too stupid of me that I didn’t ask them for feedback.

The third lesson is from nowadays me. Having hosted interns myself, I now know how mentors choose people to invite for an interview. The truth is that it’s extremely difficult to predict if a person is a good fit for the team or not. With interns, you get lots on applications for a single intern position and you have only 10-15 interview slots, so you have to somehow decide whom to invite. Good candidates usually have similarly “OK” test task solutions and little relevant experience, so you need some other criteria. It is motivation. People with clear motivation and lots of enthusiasm are much more likely to succeed, even if they don’t have a lot of experience and the strongest Java knowledge.

So your motivation should be very clear and your enthusiasm should be obvious, when you apply for a position. I didn’t include any motivation or explanation of why I was a good fit for the position. I would definitely fix this making sure that I stand out from all the candidates.

For me, this story was, first of all, an important lesson. Secondly, now I’m very thankful that I didn’t get this position. The same summer I did a 1-month research internship at JetBrains, learned a lot about the company, its values and culture and understood that that’s the right place for me. Next summer I did an internship at JetBrains again, but this time with PyCharm team. But that’s the story for another time…