/logs - interview | marvell | internship

02/05 - Got selected for an interview for a network validation internship role at Marvell Technology at the Santa Clara office. Lady luck has taken pity on me, I hope.

02/09 - Before interview - Can't relax at all.

Technical Interview: crushed it! Interviewer was very interested in my projects, especially the RL-TCP one. Had a passionate discussion (mostly just me excitedly rambling to someone who wants to listen :) Then a few minutes of live Python coding just to see if I knew what I was talking about; did well there with OOP concepts. Finally some details about the company, role, who I'd be working with, and some questions from me. Overall, a good one. Sent a follow-up that night as well.

02/15 - Interviewer and colleague want to have a quick casual chat.

02/20 - Before the meeting - Still no idea what to expect.

Casual chat: A quick intro, briefly touched on projects and past internship. The focus seemed to be on soft skills, especially problem-solving and failure-handling mindset. Seems like they were gauging culture fit...

Interviewer followed up over the next few days to clarify my familiarity with: pandas, SQL, Docker.

03/04 - Been a while since I've heard from them, so I send a follow up message to the interviewer over LinkedIn.

03/05 - Interviewer unofficially informs me I did not make the cut, as the summer project involves GenAI, and my data science background was not stronger than the other candidate. Bit of a sucker punch considering how well the convos were going. Also I'm a little pissed that it was a data science role, even though the job description was "Applications Engineer - Network Validation"; why post a misleading JD then?

03/11 - end of process, with official rejection.

03/16 - sent my feedback to the interviewer.