Why Shopee is the best place to kickstart your tech career in Singapore
During the summer of 2018, I was fortunate to join Shopee as a Software Engineering Intern through the Labs Internship Program for my very first internship. Looking back, joining Shopee was one of the best moves I have ever made. It was a truly fulfilling experience where I was exposed to the software engineering industry, gained valuable knowledge, and the experience itself has opened many doors for me in my job hunt soon after I left Shopee. I believe the tech internship at Shopee is top-notch and I feel very lucky to have worked there. In this article, I will explain why, as a college student who wants to start a career in software engineering, Shopee is one of the best (if not the best) places to start in Singapore. I will also provide tips on getting an offer at the end of this article.
Please note that both Shopee and Garena are under Sea, their parent company. And Labs is their R&D department, hence the name “Labs Internship Program”. Your internship takes place at either Shopee or Garena, and according to what I heard from my friends who did their internship at Garena, the experience was very similar. However, as I did not intern at Garena, I can only speak for my experience at Shopee!
A well-structured and rigorous program
When you join Shopee as a software engineer intern, you know exactly what is underway. From the Sea career website, as well as the first-day orientation, you are well informed the structure of your 10–13 weeks internship. This is your roadmap to success. Read on, and I will explain them in detail.
Entry task with great mentorship
You are inexperienced and you probably suck, everybody knows that, and it is okay. That's why they have prepared the entry task for you and will assign you a mentor to help you onboard. I joined the Web Front End team at Shopee with very little knowledge of Web development, but it didn’t matter at all. The entry task is not trivial — it has detailed requirements, and you are expected to develop a fully functioning app adheres to all requirements — both product-wise and technology-wise. It is highly challenging and intensive, but also where learning happens. During the entry task, I got my hands dirty on numerous types of technologies and had a quick grasp on web front end development.
Things can get hard, you might get lost, but help is always there. You will be assigned a mentor when you join the team, and he or she will guide you through difficulties. Although anyone can offer you a hand when you face difficulties, your mentor will be the person who reviews your code and provides you with feedback. The mentorship still goes on after your entry task.
Real work, real impact
You don’t work on toy projects. At Shopee, you are working on real products that once deployed, will be used by millions of people. As of Dec 22, 2018, Shopee is available in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia Vietnam, and the Philippines. Given that, Shopee has a large number of users and every line of code you write will have direct impacts on their shopping experience. During my time at Shopee, I was involved in the development of some web pages and they were eventually deployed to the live server and are now being used by millions of users. Very few companies are able to have that impact, so you can be truly proud of your work.
Intensive learning to become a real engineer
Learning is the major part throughout your internship, and you should be expecting that. The amount of knowledge I learned throughout the internship is far more than that from any university course. Especially for someone like me whose experience was very limited, I stumbled very often so I had to catch up with those technologies by learning every day. It can be stressful sometimes, but you know you are on your way of becoming a real engineer. You are an amateur today, but one day you will become a skilled engineer, and this is where it begins.
Great resources accessible by everyone
No prior experience but eager to learn? Fret not, there are tons of resources available to you! Over the years, engineers at Sea have developed a platform to share their knowledge. And being a Shopee employee means that you get access to all those high-quality learning materials such as online courses and workshops. Even though you are just an intern, you get invited to attend workshops and technical sharing!
Work with the brightest people
Engineers at Shopee are extremely skilled and talented. I believe one of the reasons behind is their rigorous (and also tedious) hiring process with a high hiring bar to make sure they find the best fit. Speaking from my experience, I interviewed for the internship program during Fall 2017, and I went through multiple stages before receiving an offer. I started with a talk with HR, finished a written test and had the first technical interview. Two weeks later, I had a second technical interview. After a week, they moved me forward to a final interview with the VP. I had been applying to other companies in Singapore, but none of their hiring processes is comparable to what I went through at Shopee, with the only exception of Google.
You are appreciated and valued
Despite being an intern, you also get involved in meetings with full-time engineers and product managers. In many ways, you are treated just like a full-time engineer!
Fun activities
On a Friday around late July, all interns were invited for a half-day bonding event at Universal Studio Singapore! After that, we had our team bonding event (web front end team and designers) at a pottery workshop.
Competitive pay, great benefits
Technical internships in Singapore are mostly underpaid. But at Shopee, you still get a decent pay which makes it stand out from other internship programs and also makes your life much easier. Working at Shopee, you enjoy the great benefits including free breakfast, free dinner, unlimited snacks & drinks and so on. After all, you are appreciated and valued.
Getting a tech internship offer from Shopee is not easy, but that also makes your experience at Shopee invaluable. From my own experience and feedback from my friends, here are some tips that may help you succeed.
Apply early
There are only a limited number of spots, so it is in your best interest to apply early! If you are late, there might be very few vacancies and it will be more competitive than it already is.
Attend on-campus event
It is always easier to interact directly with recruiters than apply online. They usually visit my school’s career fair, so make sure to find them on campus and network with them. It can make your application much easier!
Expect challenging interview questions
Many people have reported that interviews at Shopee are more difficult than most of the other companies. Therefore, spend time on improving your skills and knowledge such as data structures, algorithms, databases, object-oriented programming, and computer science fundamentals (operating systems, computer networks, etc). You also want to get yourself comfortable with the lovely/notorious whiteboard coding.
Be ready to talk about your projects and show your passion
During the first technical interview and the final interview with VP, I was asked about projects I did in the past. Make sure you have some projects to talk about and display your passion for your work. In addition, it helps you get through resume screening — that’s the starting point.
Good luck!
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