How a coding challenge got me an internship at Myntra -By Biswajit Nayak from NIT Rourkela

I very clearly remember how in September 2019 I came to know about Myntra HackerRamp from my friends. It was a Hackathon which was primarily focused on fashion related ideas and solutions in that field. We teamed up, applied for it, and made it to the finals. Fortunately enough, both the teams from NIT Rourkela bagged the Winners and Runners-Up position respectively. It was this day that my journey of bagging an internship at Myntra kick-started!

It was December 2019, when finally after being the Runners-Up of the Hackathon, I decided to keep my nose to the grindstone, and with all the luck, I made headway. I cleared the next hurdle of 2 technical PI’s which were based on data structures and problem-solving. And when the final selection list was announced, I was on cloud nine!

The smooth shift of on-ground internship to the virtual mode

Soon after the results were declared, we were given our offer letter along with all the details regarding our internship at Myntra. We were offered to-fro traveling arrangements, accommodations, and all the other necessities during our travel to Bangalore, but unfortunately, Covid-19 took the form of a global pandemic during this time. However, despite the ongoing pandemic, our HR SPOC Deepthi Thomas made the whole process smooth and easy. It was decided that the whole internship process will be conducted online.

On the first day of our internship at Myntra, we were given an introduction to the company and how things worked. Various sessions were conducted by HR SPOCs along with leadership sessions by some of the industry kingpins. By the end of the day, we had a proper idea of how the whole team functions and how tasks were carried out in the engineering team.

And the journey begins...

I interned as a software engineer at Myntra. Initially, I spent almost 10 days reading and getting myself acquainted with the new technologies on which I was supposed to work. Following this, my manager assigned me small tasks so that I get a proper hold of the things, which I recently learned. Next, I was given two main projects to work on. The first one was the deletion of expired cards from a user’s profile and the next one was based on a backend communication protocol.

The reassuring and positive work culture at Myntra

The thoughts which I had before the internship about how will I finish up my work and will I be able to cope up with the tasks and the team which is assigned to me, bothered me a lot. But the reality was very different from this. A special thanks to my manager Vishwas Gupta, who ensured I was coping up with whatever tasks were given to me and also made sure all my technical doubts were cleared. In fact, because of the team stand-up calls that were conducted regularly, everyone was able to give their updates and sorted out the issues faced. Even the teammates I worked with were very helpful. They were always available for any sort of doubts I had.

During my initial days of internship at Myntra, I was given sufficient time to learn and get used to the new technologies which I was about to be working with. My mentor/manager made sure that I was climbing the ladder, the right way. The most exciting part was Friday evenings when we had all kinds of topics for discussion but work. Initially, I had a bit of difficulty getting along with them but soon I was able to get along and participate in the fun events. Overall. the work culture was very reassuring and positive. The experience was a lot better than my expectations. 

Enriching skills and garnering new learnings

I got to learn about a lot of new technologies starting from Java to new scripting languages, during my internship at Myntra. Though it was a remote/WFH internship, I came out as a better person who learned many new technical skills, managing time, and most importantly, enjoying work without worrying much about it. A minor setback due to the WFH scenario was when we did not have proper access to the code repository and the environment setup took days to get configured. But considering all the learnings and takeaways from the internship, this seems far negligible.

Saving the best for last

During the mid-period of our internship at Myntra, we were informed that interviews would be conducted for PPO selections. We had 2 rounds of interviews, the 1st one focussed on data structures and algorithms, and the 2nd one was primarily based on the work we did during our internship. Even the interviews were not as stressful as one would think them to be. To be frank, the interviewers were cool and did not make it look like a grilling questionnaire. Finally, after a wait of some days, I got my PPO confirmation mail on July 10th and that made my day! 

All in all, I achieved something which I never dreamt of a year before, from winning a hackathon to getting an internship to securing a full-time offer at Myntra, I was overjoyed.