Free Office Hours for Non-Traditional ML Researchers

Xiaoyi Yin (尹肖贻) has kindly translated this post into Chinese (中文)

This post was prompted by a tweet I saw from my colleague, Colin:

I'm currently a researcher at Google with a "non-traditional background", where non-traditional background means "someone who doesn't have a PhD". People usually get PhDs so they can get hired for jobs that require that credential. In the case of AI/ML, this might be to become a professor at a university, or land a research scientist position at a place like Google, or sometimes even both.

At Google it's possible to become a researcher without having a PhD, although it's not very easy. There are a two main paths [1]:

One path is to join an AI Residency Program, which are fixed-term jobs from non-university institution (FAANG companies, AI2, etc.) that aim to jump-start a research career in ML/AI. However, these residencies are usually just 1 year long and are not long enough to really "prove yourself" as a researcher.

Another path is to start as a software engineer (SWE) in an ML-focused team and build your colleagues' trust in your research abilities. This was the route I took: I joined Google in 2016 as a software engineer in the Google Brain Robotics team. Even though I was a SWE by title, it made sense to focus on the "most important problem", which was to think really hard about why the robots weren't doing what we wanted and train deep neural nets in an attempt to fix those problems. One research project led to another, and now I just do research + publications all the time.

As the ML/AI publishing field has grown exponentially in the last few years, it has gotten harder to break into research (see Colin's tweet). Top PhD programs like BAIR usually require students to have a publication at a top conference like ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS before they even apply. I'm pretty sure I would not have been accepted to any PhD programs if I were graduating from college today, and would have probably ended up taking a job offer in quantitative finance instead.

The uphill climb gets even steeper for aspiring researchers with non-traditional backgrounds; they are competing with no shortage of qualified PhD students. As Colin alludes to, it is also getting harder for internationals to work at American technology companies and learn from American schools, thanks to our administration's moronic leadership.

The supply-demand curves for ML/AI labor are getting quite distorted. On one hand, we have a tremendous global influx of people wanting to solve hard engineering problems and contribute to scientific knowledge and share it openly with the world. On the other hand, there seems to be a shortage of formal training:

1. A research mentor to learn the academic lingo and academic customs from, and more importantly, how to ask good questions and design experiments to answer them.
2. Company environments where software engineers are encouraged to take bold risks and lead their own research (and not just support researchers with infra).

Free Office Hours

I can't do much for (2) at the moment, but I can definitely help with (1). To that end, I'm offering free ML research mentorship to aspiring researchers from non-traditional backgrounds via email and video conferencing.

I'm most familiar with applied machine learning, robotics, and generative modeling, so I'm most qualified to offer technical advice in these areas. I have a bunch of tangential interests like quantitative finance, graphics, and neuroscience. Regardless of technical topic, I can help with academic writing and de-risking ambitious projects and choosing what problems to work on. I also want to broaden my horizons and learn more from you.

If you're interested in using this resource, send me an email at <myfirstname><mylastname><2004><at><g****.com>. In your email, include:

1. Your resume
2. What you want to get out of advising
3. A cool research idea you have in a couple sentences

Some more details on how these office hours will work:

1. Book weekly or bi-weekly Google Meet [2] calls to check up on your work and ask questions, with 15 minute time slots scheduled via Google Calendar.
2. The point of these office hours is not to answer "how do I get a job at Google Research", but to fulfill an advisor-like role in lieu of a PhD program. If you are farther along your research career we can discuss career paths and opportunities a little bit, but mostly I just want to help people with (1).
3. I'm probably not going to write code or run experiments for you.
4. I don't want to be that PI that slaps their name on all of their student's work - most advice I give will be given freely with no strings attached. If I make a significant contribution to your work or spend > O(10) hours working with you towards a publishable result, I may request being a co-author on a publication.
5. I reserve the right to decline meetings if I feel that it is not a productive use of my time or if other priorities take hold.
6. I cannot tell you about unpublished work that I'm working on at Google or any Google-confidential information.
7. I'm not offering ML consultation for businesses, so your research work has to be unrelated to your job.
8. To re-iterate point number 2 once more, I'm less interested in giving career advice and more interested in teaching you how to design experiments, how to cite and write papers, and communicating research effectively.

What do I get out of this? First, I get to expand my network. Second, I can only personally run so many experiments by myself so this would help me grow my own research career. Third, I think the supply of mentorship opportunities offered by academia is currently not scalable, and this is a bit of an experiment on my part to see if we can do better. I'd like to give aspiring researchers similar opportunities that I had 4 years ago that allowed me to break into the field.

Footnotes

[1] Chris Olah has a great essay on some additional options and pros and cons of non-traditional education.

[2] Zoom complies with Chinese censorship requests, so as a statement of protest I avoid using Zoom when possible.

How to Get an Internship

Update: 9/3/2016 - Denis Tarasov of HSE in Moscow, Russia has kindly translated this article into Russian - read it here. I welcome translations into other languages!

About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about my various internship experiences. It ended up being quite popular with recruiters, and actually helped me to land my full-time job at Google.

I've also been getting emails from students seeking internship advice. Every time I get one of these, my ego approximately doubles in size. Thank you.

In this post, I'll share my strategy for landing tech internships. I've wanted to write this for some time now, but I've been hesitant to posture some kind of "magic recipe" when a lot of my own success was mostly due to luck.

I'm just another fresh graduate trying to figure things out, and here's what I believe in:

#1 Work on Side Projects

You don't need to be at Google to work on the kinds of problems that Google interns do, nor do you need to work at a hedge fund to learn about finance. Pursue those interests on your own!

Want to try animation? Here are some project ideas:

• Make a 30 second short film in Autodesk Maya (free for students) or Blender 3D (free for everybody)
• Do a 11 Second Club animation. 
• Make something cool with Pixar's own Renderman software (free for non-commercial use). I'll bet less than 1% of the resumes that Pixar receives from students list experience with Renderman.
• Draw something on ShaderToy.
• Implement a physically-based rendering algorithm.

Want to be a software engineer?

• Make an Android / iOS app from scratch (Android learning curve is easier). 
• Learn how to use Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform. 
• Open source your work. A Managing Director at D. E. Shaw once told me that "Github is the new resume".
• Check out Show HN to see what projects other folks are working on.

Finance:

• Participate in a Kaggle competition. Get your first-hand experience with overfitting.
• Do some financial market research on Quantopian. This is the kind of work that real quants do all day. 
• Contribute to open source projects like Beaker and Satellite. Who knows, you might even impress someone inside the company.

Working on side projects accomplishes several objectives simultaneously:

• It builds your brand (see #2).
• It shows the hiring committee that you are willing to hone your craft on your own time, instead of merely trading your time for their money and status.
• It's a low-risk way to find out if you're actually interested in the field.
• In the process of building stuff, you might re-discover important theoretical and engineering challenges that professionals grapple with. In my sophomore year, I wrote a Bitcoin- arbitrage bot in Python. Bitcoin exchanges list the price and volume of all open limit orders in the book, while actual financial markets do not. This results in a very fundamental difference in the way Market Impact is treated, and gave me something interesting to talk about during my Two Sigma interviews. What I learned was super elementary, but still more practical experience than most candidates.

Don't worry about your projects being impressive or even novel - just focus on improving your skills and exercising your creativity. A little bit of experience using a company's products and technologies will give you a huge edge over other candidates.

Start as early as you can. The job application process doesn't begin during the fall recruiting season; it begins as soon as you want it to.

#2 Make Your Own Website

Here's a secret: the more you market yourself, the more recruiters will reach out to you. Building your own personal website will make you extremely visible.

Your website is basically a resume in long-form, but also functions as your personal brand. Here are some screenshots of other people's sites:

Your website should accomplish several things:

• Make it easy for recruiters to come across your portfolio via Google Search.
• Reveal your personality in ways that a 1-page resume cannot. In particular, it's a great opportunity to showcase aesthetic sense and visual creativity.
• You should add an attractive profile picture of yourself. Putting a candid, smiling face will help people recognize you and put a face to your list of impressive accomplishments.

Platforms like Github Pages, Google App Engine, Wordpress, Weebly let you set up a website for free. Domain names are cheap - as little as $10 a year.

In addition to showcasing your coding projects, you should list a description of your work in a way that is accessible to people who can't read code. Better yet, write blog posts and tutorials for your projects - what you did and how you did it. Your site will get a lot more visibility if people find it useful.

The story you tell through your website - the first impression that you make - is of utmost importance. Do it right, and recruiters will come like ants to a picnic. 

#3 Study CS

If you're not sure what you want to do in the long term, choose skills and experiences that give you the most flexibility in the future. I recommend studying some kind of math + CS degree (if you're more interested in research roles) or a illustration + CS double major (if you're more interested in joining the entertainment industry).

I started my undergraduate education thinking I would study neuroscience, because "I could learn CS by myself." This was a big mistake:

• My resume got passed over in resume screens because I listed "neuroscience" as my major. I eventually got through by begging a Google recruiter to give me a chance with the phone interview. Afterwards, I switched to Applied Math-CS.
• Getting good at CS requires lots of practice. School is a good place to do it.
• Neuroscience in the classroom has not caught up to neuroscience in the lab. Cutting edge research is pretty much optogenetics or computational (which is more CS + math + physics than neuroscience anyway).

More on the last point: I discovered that neuroscience students who knew how to program in MATLAB got to work directly on high-level research questions and interpret experimental data. Students who didn't ended up doing grunt work in the lab - dissecting tiny brains, pipetting liquids, and relying on others to code analysis routines for them.

Neuroscience is not the only field that is being disrupted by technology; we will be seeing more "software-defined research" in the coming years. For better or worse, the scientists, doctors, lawyers of the future will all be programmers.

Why is math important? Math gives you additional flexibility to break into hard-tech research roles, if you so desire. It's really hard to transition directly into an industry research team (such as Google Research or Microsoft Research) with only a CS undergrad degree.

Even though I was able to get more exposure to math at my Two Sigma internship, I was unsuccessful at getting a quant research internship because my background typecasts me into software engineering roles. It is also my own grievous fault for not being better at math.

If you want to work in film or games or even a product management role at a tech company, then studying math makes less sense; you should study illustration instead. I've noticed that at Pixar, many Technical Directors want to contribute more to story and art direction, but find themselves pigeonholed into specific roles (they have one "car guy", one "vegetation shading girl", and so on).

Being good at illustration will help you break into more creative roles like Art Director or Story Artist. It's also flexible - illustrators are needed everywhere, from design to comics to games. Illustration + CS is a potent skillset.

Candidly, math is safer, more flexible, and more lucrative than illustration. It is also future-proof in ways that other valuable degrees (such as design, law, and business) are not. That said, I find art incredibly valuable and continue practicing it as a hobby.

In any case, study CS. It will feed you and pay off your student debts and open so many doors. Don't be discouraged if you find CS difficult, or if your classmates seem to be way better at it than you. It wasn't until my third attempt to learn programming that things started to stick in my head.

Stick with CS, and the sky's the limit.

#4 Seek Diverse, Contrarian Experiences

Your coursework, extracurriculars, and internship experiences will have a big impact on your creative process. Diverse experiences enable you to approach problems differently than others, which will make you unique and harder to replace.

Pursue courses outside your major and let them inspire your projects. I don't mean this in the sense of "combining fields for the sake of mixing your interests together," like some contrived Egyptology-Physics senior thesis (just a hypothetical example, no offense to those who do this).

Instead, ideas from one field might lead to a real competitive advantage in another. For instance:

• It's been said that Reed College's Calligraphy Class was a formative experience in Steve Jobs's design-minded vision for Apple products.

source: reed.edu

• John Lasseter and Ed Catmull believed that 3D computer graphics was not just a fancy artistic medium, but the future of animation itself. They were right.

Pixar's The Adventures of André and Wally B.

• Here is an elegant and beautiful explanation of a Math proof using interpretive dance. Sometimes difficult concepts become strikingly clear when the right diagram is drawn.

Here's a personal anecdote: I did several years of computational neuroscience research in college, which shaped the way I think about debugging complicated simulations in Machine Learning. Inspired by this, I pitched a project idea to a ML professor at my school. He thought it was a terrible idea. I went ahead and built it anyway, and it actually got me my current job. 

Diverse experiences help you to discover original or even contrarian ideas. Find something that only you believe to be true. If you're right, the upside is enormous. 

#5 Plan your next 10 years

Everybody's got dreams.

Some people dream of creating Strong AI, some want to make it to the Forbes 30 under 30 list, some want to be parents by the age of 32, some just want to make it to tomorrow.

It's really important, even as a college student applying for internships, to reflect on what you want and where you want to be in the long-term. Time is so precious; don't waste any time at a job that isn't growing the skills you want. It's okay to be unsure of what you want to do with your life, but at least write down a list of life/career trajectories that you think will make you happy.

Every so often, re-evaluate your long-term goals and whether the position you're in is taking you there or growing the skills that you want. Some questions to ask yourself:

• How will I pay off my student debt?
• Can I see myself doing pure software engineering (frontend, backend, mobile apps) for the remainder of my career? 
• How long do I see myself working at my current employer?
• Do I want to transition into more math-y roles like ML research or quantitative finance?
• Do I want to transition into a product management or leadership role?
• Do I want to start my own company someday? Am I okay exchanging coding and making stuff, for the privilege of running a company?
• Do I want to become a Venture Capitalist someday?
• If I plan to have kids by the time I'm 32 - where do I want to be? Who do I want to be with?
• If I keep doing this, will I be happy in ten years? 

Finally, when making plans, don't take your physical, mental, or financial health for granted - have a backup plan in case your best laid plans go awry.

######################### PART 2 ##########################

95% of playing the internship game is what I've listed above. The remaining 5% is the actual interview process.

#6 Skip the Resume Screen

The first stage of most internship applications is a resume screen. The recruiter, who must sift through a huge stack of applications, glances at your resume for about six seconds, then either recycles it or sends you a follow up email.

SIX SECONDS! That's just enough time do pattern matching for brand-name schools, tech company names, and what programming languages you know. The recruiter will also make a snap judgment just based on how neat and pretty your resume looks. Consequently, resume screens are pretty noisy when it comes to judging inexperienced college students.

Fortunately, there are a couple ways to skip the resume screen entirely:

• If you get a referral from someone inside the company, recruiters will consider your application more carefully. If your resume is not horrible to look at, you'll almost certainly make it to the next stage. I was lucky enough to get referrals for Pixar and Two Sigma. However, these are stories for another day ;)
• If you are an underrepresented minority (URM) in Technology, companies are bending over backwards to get you to pass their interviews. At conferences like Grace Hopper, you can actually get a free pass out of the resume screening and the phone screen, and do on-the-spot whiteboard interviews with companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc. This improves the odds of landing an internship dramatically. A classmate of mine actually got an internship offer from Apple, on the spot, with only her resume (no interview or anything).  Reach out to your computer science department and ask if they would sponsor your attendance.
• Reach out to engineers directly through your school alumni network, and ask them to refer you. Don't be shy - it's very little work on their part and they will get nice a referral bonus if you succeed. The worst thing that could happen is that they ignore you, which doesn't cost you anything.

It goes without saying that your resume should be on point: everything perfectly aligned and legible with zero typos. Tailor each resume for the company that you are applying to.

Tech companies that visit college campuses will often hold resume review sessions for students (Yelp, Microsoft, Google do this). This is super useful, and you should use this resource even if it's with a company you don't want to work for. Not surprisingly, tech recruiters give better industry-specific advice than college career counselors. 

If at all possible, skip the resume screen. In fact, if you have an offer deadline coming up, companies will often fast-track you straight to the on-site interview. The resume screen and phone interviews are just qualifiers for the on-site, which pretty much solely determines whether you make it in or not. Don't go through the front door.

#7 Phone and On-Site Interviews

After the noisy resume screen, you are the master of your own fate. Typically there are one or two phone interviews followed by an on-site 5-hour interview. The phone interviews are like miniature versions of on-site interviews, where you write code on a Google Doc or Etherpad.

All that matters at this point is how well you solve the coding challenges. If you do solve the problems quickly and correctly, and your behavior doesn't set off any red flags, you'll probably get the job.

My experience is that difficulty of the interview is roughly correlated with firm's selectivity and salary. The hardest interviews I've had were with Google Deepmind, D. E. Shaw, Two Sigma, Quora, and Vatic Labs (startups interviews tend to be pretty rigorous because their hiring decisions are riskier).

Google and Facebook were about medium in difficulty. I didn't interview for Pixar's software engineering role, so that interview was all behavioral and very easy. I've heard that Jane Street interviews are the hardest technically (apparently very popular among MIT students).

Cracking the Coding Interview is the only book you'll ever need. The practice problems are about the right level of difficulty for all software engineering roles I've ever interviewed with, and the advice is superb.

Finance firms like D.E. Shaw and Jane Street like to ask more math-oriented questions. I recommend these three books (in decreasing order of difficulty):

• A Practical Guide to Quantitative  Finance Interviews
• Quant Job Interview Questions and Answers
• Heard on the Street

Preparing for whiteboard interviews is like studying for the SATs - a complete waste of time, but important enough that you gotta do it. There are some startups that are trying to disrupt the broken interview system, but I am uncertain if they will ever be successful.

On the behavioral side: be humble, be confident, smile a lot, ask good questions. Wear smart casual. Here's a trick to smiling often: every few seconds, imagine that the interviewer just extended you a job offer.

"Congratulations, you got the job!"

"Congratulations, you got the job!"

#8 Be Old

It's WAY easier to get internships as a rising junior or senior in college.

Interning at Google/Facebook as a first-year is pretty rare, so don't beat yourself up if you don't get an internship right away. A lot of tech companies screen out first-years as a matter of policy.

Some finance firms only hire rising college seniors as interns because they're fiercely protective of their IP and don't want other firms poaching their interns next summer.

The school you go to matters, but if you take the time to build a personal brand and list of side projects, it matters less and less. The same goes for age.

#9 I got the internship. What do I do?

Congrats! Your internship is an opportunity, not an entitlement.

These companies are investing in your personal growth and learning, so you should work hard and learn as much as possible. You owe it to the company whose name pads your resume, you owe it to the people who vouched for you in the hiring process, and most of all, you owe it to the candidates who were just as qualified as you, but didn't get the job.

My internship offers were all very competitive so I didn't negotiate (I was also saving that social capital for full-time negotiation). You can try to negotiate your internship offers if you want, though.

#10 I didn't get an internship this summer. What do I do?

Great! You can spend the summer working on exactly what you want to work on. Most interns don't even get this luxury.

• Create deadlines for yourself as if a manager assigned them to you. 
• Have meetings with your imaginary manager where you discuss your progress. 
• Show up to "work" on time.
• Get some unemployed friends together and work in a team. Heck, not having a job lined up is the perfect opportunity to start your own company.
• Write a blog post about it. Show your future employers what a fucking awesome employee you would be if you had the opportunity.

If money is an issue, there are still a few options. You can seek out an UTRA with your university, take up a low-stress part-time job (summer RA, babysitting).

#11 Closing Thoughts

• Build your own personal brand through side projects, website, writing.
• Optimize your career decisions for learning and personal growth. 
• Work really hard.

Best of luck, and thank you for reading.

My Internship Experiences at Pixar, Google, and Two Sigma

This post was first published on 08/17/15, and has since been migrated to Blogger.

Over the last three summers, I've had the incredible privilege of interning with Pixar Animation Studios, Google Inc, and Two Sigma Investments. I wanted to summarize my experiences working in three very different industries (animation, technology, finance). CS/Applied Math students have a lot of career options open to them, and I hope this post will provide some extra perspective on what opportunities are available.

In a later post, I'll share some tips for landing tech internships.

I do not represent Pixar, Google, or Two Sigma, and all views expressed here are my own.

Pixar

Filmmaking, in its highest form, is the expression and manipulation of human emotion. Pixar is second to none at filmmaking, and their best works have such emotional power they can move an entire theatre to tears in under 240 seconds (see Up's "Married Life montage").

I interned at Pixar in 2013 as part of the Pixar Undergraduate Program (PUP). This was a 10-week educational program where we learned about Pixar's movie-making process and developed our skills in modeling, shading, lighting, etc.

"Fun and Laughter" is how I would describe the studio. I spent the first few weeks of my internship in an awestruck stupor, wondering 1) how the hell I had managed to get accepted into the program and 2) finding excuses to wander down to the atrium so I could catch sightings of legendary people.

My favorite aspect of Pixar was the opportunity to learn from the masters. When researching ideas for my PUP final project, the DP of Finding Nemo taught me about lighting underwater scenes and jellyfish. The guy who created the render-time vegetation in Brave taught me how to see the world's shapes as literal mathematical curves, noise, and fractals.

Pixar does some pretty hardcore research on the cutting edge of computer graphics (Discrete Exterior Calculus for Geometry Processing, realtime global illumination on the GPU), and their in-house animation tools are years ahead of any commercially available software. For a smallish company (1200?), their technology infrastructure is very robust.

One thing I really appreciate about Pixar is how trusting the company was with us interns' access to intellectual property (IP) and trade secrets. Our access privileges were basically equivalent to full-time employees, allowing us interns to get a clear picture of what it's like to pursue a career in animation. At Google and Two Sigma, interns are kept in an "intern container", making it harder to discern the realities of full-time life.

My primary concern with coming back full-time there are a lot of forces in the entertainment industry that pressure studios to compromise a work of art for cheap entertainment and box office returns. Pixar would rather postpone the production of a film than ship a version that sucks, which says a lot about the quality of its people and their dedication to founding values. However, even Pixar has a bottom line. I don't know how I feel about Toy Story 4 being slated for production. Given the volatile nature of the industry these days, there is some risk involved with pursuing animation as a career.

Even so, I think Pixar is one of those places that nobody ever regrets working for. For those of you who don't care much for watching movies, or think that storytelling isn't as meaningful to society as making self-driving cars or growing charity endowments, I wanted to end this section by providing a brief anecdote:

At the climax of Toy Story 3, Woody and his friends are about to perish in a trash incinerator. Realizing the futility of their struggle, Buzz reaches out to Jessie, and one by one, the toys join hands to face the flames.

I actually shed tears from the sheer awe of how a bunch of polygons could be contorted to simultaneously express the finality of the situation and everlasting friendship. The B flat minor "Bolero Effect" in the background helped too. In those moments, I forgot that I was watching a bunch of computer marionettes dance according to the 100th revision of a script. I was a kid again, and Woody and Buzz were real.

If that isn't magic, then I don't know what is.

For a broader picture of Pixar beyond my own personal experiences, I encourage you to read Ed Catmull's "Creativity Inc."

Google

It's hard for me to make any sweeping generalizations about Google, on account of how big and diverse it is. I would say that Google is like the most amazing and colorful kiddie playground you've ever seen, with C.H.O.A.M headquarters (and a dozen other things) buried underneath.

Very few people leave Google because of how goddamned comfortable it is. Full-time benefits at Google beat Pixar and Two Sigma. If you care most about raising a family, work life balance (i.e. work the least hours) and job security, you really can't go wrong with Google. Here is a picture of me eating from an endless supply of baklava.

I worked on the iOS Play Books team and implementing features for the iOS client. I also did some stuff for the Security Team that I'm not allowed to disclose (20% projects are rarer nowadays, but still available if you take the initiative). My work was incredibly fun, and I was lucky to be assigned an interesting, user-facing project that eventually saw the light of day.

Well, that depends if anybody actually uses iOS Play Books...

Google has the best tech infrastructure of any firm I know (even among other big tech companies). Developers have root access, code review is streamlined, unit testing comes with progress bars, and compilation is blaze-ingly fast. Everything, from onboarding to recruiting to Techstop is fast and can elastically scale. Every summer, Google onboards 2000 interns in a matter of weeks, and the workforce subsequently grows by 10%. Even with this increased load on infrastructure, outages are rare.

Concerns: I'm scared of becoming a small cog and spending the rest of my career drinking smoothies from Slice Cafe and being unchallenged by my work. There are certainly some roles at the company that would make me feel that way, but also plenty of teams that I would jump at the chance to work for. In particular, I'm interested in some more open-ended research positions.

For more perspectives on what full-time Google is like, I recommend reading comments on Hacker News that discuss Google. Lots of current and ex-Googlers hang out there.

Two Sigma

Two Sigma is a hedge fund whose core business is "algorithmic trading". In a nutshell, TS uses technology and mathematics to forecast stock prices, and build systems to automatically execute strategies to realize ludicrous profit.

Two Sigma is like the math/CS equivalent of Pixar's art/CS dream team. TS employs a small but high concentration of talent; there are literally International Math Olympiad medalists left and right, and the majority of people I ate lunch with were Phds. If you draw a directed graph between companies, where edges represent employee migration, you'll see lots of edges going from Goldman, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook to Two Sigma. There are very few edges going the other way.

The hedge fund business is lucrative. I don't have enough data, but I'm pretty sure full-time engineering/quant comp at firms like Two Sigma/Shaw/Citadel are slightly better (sometimes a lot better) than those of tech companies in the bay area.

Overall, I think the firm has better career growth opportunities than its competitors. By nature of being a smaller company (700+), the average Two Sigma employee has more responsibilities than the average Google employee, which I like a lot. Company culture is a bit more serious - median dress code ranges from business casual / smart casual, and there are no scooters or scooter-riders lying around. I like that too.

This summer I joined the Quantiative Applications Engineering team and worked on a project related to portfolio optimization. I had been looking for more exposure to mathematics in my work, so that I wouldn't be pigeonholed as a software engineer for the rest of my career. Finance/math problems interest me more than UX.

Office floor plans are quite similar to Google Building 47 (that I worked in), minus the bespoke decor, the chinese food cafe and the nice lady that served tea from 3-5pm every day. I forgot to take pictures of the office, so I'll just throw in a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge that I took on one of our intern events.

The internship program was really well-run: Two Sigma only takes a handful of interns each summer, so they took us on a lot of fun intern outings. Pixar's intern classes are small too, but departments run on different schedules so I mostly just hung out with the other PUPs.

Two Sigma is a secretive firm, and there is little useful information about it floating on the public Internet. To learn more about the hedge fund industry, I recommend reading "More Money than God" by Sebastian Mallaby.

Personal Rankings

Below is a table of company factors that I've ranked Pixar, Google, and Two Sigma by, with "1" being the best. Keep in mind that these rankings are not objective realities, and that people prioritize different factors. For example, the "Culture" rankings are scored according to "which company's culture I thrive best in", not "which company I think has the best culture".

	Pixar	Google	Two Sigma
Compensation	3	2	1
Career Growth	2	3	1
Culture	1	3	2
Perks	2	1	3
Facilities	2	1	3
Hours	3	1	2

Trivia

	Pixar	Google	Two Sigma
Team	Pixar Undergraduate Program	iOS Play Books	Quantitative Applications Engineering
Most Memorable Experience	During orientation, we were shown an early screening of "The Blue Umbrella". I thought to myself, "we're in on the secret..."	Food trucks that one does not need to pay for	Breathtaking amounts of money flashing across my screen
My Typical Lunch	Luxo Cafe	Jia's, then Charlies, then Yoshka's, followed by Slice ...	Go to Chinatown with Chinese co-workers. Practice my mandarin
What I did in my spare time	Browse the intranet for juicy info	Browse the intranet for juicy info	Browse the intranet for juicy info

Closing Thoughts

Even now, I'm still a bit bewildered at how fortunate I was to intern at these awesome places, full of the best of the best of the best. It would not have been possible without well-placed recommendations from friends, mentors, co-workers who believed in me, and I am forever grateful to them.

I have my concerns about Pixar/Google/Two Sigma, but I believe I can either solve or navigate around the problems. Realistically, no company is perfect and anyone who says otherwise is either a beneficiary of the status quo, lying, or just plain naive. I'd definitely consider going back to any of these companies full-time (contingent on them wanting me back!).

So, what happens next? I'll be graduating in the Spring of 2016 with my Masters in CS, and I am currently looking for full-time positions (at other companies too). Deciding on a full-time job is a serious matter, so I'm keeping an open mind and taking my time deciding.

Thank you for reading.