InternCompass

[Fall 2017] I worked at The Coalition, a game studio owned by Microsoft best known for the Gears of War series. They have an office in Downtown Vancouver (15 mins away from "Big Park," the other MSFT office) WORK: Game development is hectic and haphazard, and unfortunately, I came in during a particularly busy time for my team. I didn't really have a chance to sit down with someone and "learn the ropes," and I was instead thrust head-first into a task and told to "figure it out." Now, Unreal Engine 4 is a BEAST, and is not something that easily lends itself to "self learning." Pile-on all of the game-specific things you need to know, getting started in the codebase was incredibly difficult... Regardless, one of the (few) nice things… Show More

Worked at Microsoft in summer 2017. Despite not being at the HQ in Redmond, there were intern events every week or two (paintball, baseball games, cruise, etc), and we also got flown to Seattle for a week for the famous signature event. In terms of work, I was put on a great team where my project was actually critical for the team. I became good friends with my mentor and manager, but with a company as big as Microsoft, team culture can really vary. The team asked for my preferences on the type of work I want beforehand and gave me something that matched them exactly, despite me not having any experience in that domain beforehand. However, I did find that intern expectations here were noticeably higher than the other companies I worked… Show More

As mentioned in other reviews, Microsoft is the biggest software company in the world and your internship experience varies drastically depending on what team you are assigned. I would like to emphasize the compensation in this review. Microsoft literally makes it rain for interns. For first time Microsoft interns (not explorer), you will get paid $7200 per month (per tax). If you were to return to Microsoft as an intern, your salary will get bumped to $7650 and you will receive a one-time bonus of $5000. On top of the base salary and bonus, you can either choose to live in a corporate housing (hella fancy one, with bi-weekly cleaning service) or a one-time $9000 housing stipend for your 4-month internship. So if you are a returning… Show More

Summer 2017 (May - Aug) Highlight: They really care about your mentorship and you as a person in all aspects! I worked on the iOS team without any previous experience in mobile at all, and everyone I spoke to made it very clear that doing something that you don't have experience in is completely and totally fine - and actually encouraged. In theory a lot of companies do the same, but in practice very few actually do that. Each person I spoke to have some crazy background story, like they were homeless for a few months and then biked across the USA for charity or studied food tasting science and then decided to go into data science. That made being there really interesting, and the company tries to be very transparent and very human all… Show More

It really depends on your team. I didn't feel connected to my team at all, and they didn't seem that interested in me or what I was doing. The test environment broke all the time and people didn't care. I was stuck with an underpowered dev server for the first 2 months which made everything very slow and flaky. Sometimes it took weeks for people to review my code. When planning my project, one teammate kept harping on the fact that it's "an intern project" and "Maybe he doesn't know how to code." My manager was not a good mentor. One of the first things he told me was how his previous intern's project is no longer used in production at all. He often acted as if things could be done in a "few hours" or "a day" when it would obviously be… Show More