Twitter Apprenticeship Application

This week I’ll be covering my application process for Twitter’s engineering apprenticeship program. And man oh man was this a wake-up call.

Applications for Twitter’s Engineering Apprenticeship program for Fall 2021 opened up on July 9th, and they close today, July 16th. This program caught my attention, not because it was Twitter (although I’m sure for most that had something to do with it). It caught my attention because I was caught off guard by their values.

I always kind of saw Twitter like Facebook; like it was some kind of necessary evil that most people used in their day-to-day lives, whether it be to keep in touch with people or for others not-so-nice reasons. It was never really something that I saw as helping to build up communities or really even something all that useful.

But I am so glad that I went to one of their informational sessions. It definitely shook up my point of view; I wasn’t expecting it to be welcoming, or understanding, or something that was trying to help create a kind of global social impact. I found out that not only do they value their employees with the wide range of benefits and opportunities that are provided to them, but they also really want to try and foster a place where everyone can belong. It doesn’t matter if you’re not classically trained or you are, or if your background isn’t all that rosy, or if you by chance grew up on Rodeo Drive. Through their values, they are working to create a space where everyone who works there can feel comfortable being themselves, and for their users, they’re working to help sort out the bile and the misinformation and all sorts of other ugliness that serves to try and divide us instead of bringing us together.

These are most of the reasons that I chose to apply for their apprenticeship program. Because I want to help be a part of the change that makes living bearable again, and helps to foster local communities and just plain ol’ help people.

Know I think I know what you’re thinking: “how on earth can a platform like Twitter even begin to help with those issues?” and well, I kind of thought that too at first, but let me help to illuminate the possibilities.

With a global platform like Twitter, people can get instant news updates, they can find out about events and resources going on in their local communities, and they can find all sorts of people already reaching out and offering help to those who need it. It can serve to help show us what it means to be human again; not red or blue, or our orientation, or our race (although I do understand that race has a major role to play in our current human climate and it rightfully deserves to have long and lengthy and difficult discussions), or anything else that might serve to try and divide us.

And I want to help be a part of this change; this change to help us remember that we are all human.

I want to be able to say that I helped to foster this wonderful community of awesome human beings; that I was a part of the solution, not the problem. And while I do understand that these are some pretty lofty ideals, I think they’re worth it.

But anyway I digress, and I’ll step off of my soapbox for now, and actually cover what the application process was like.

First, it began with filling out an application unlike any other I have experienced before. There was a whole training series that you could take beforehand (which was something like 17-ish hours or so long), you could include a message to the hiring manager along with the normal resume, etc. For me filling it out took probably about an hour, but seemed relatively easy although also complex.

After I submitted my application, I was invited to participate in their HackerRank challenge 😬 Let me start by saying that these are definitely not my strong suit! But Twitter is gracious enough to give its applicants 3 days to complete this challenge 🤯 which seems unheard of in my little bit of experience so far.

The challenge was a total of 5 question; two of which were coding problems. There were 3 ‘about me’ questions, one of which was “Tell us your life story in tweets”. Once I had those complete I moved on to the coding questions, in which if I remember correctly was something akin to ranking a group of gamer’s scores, and then returning how many of their characters could level up when being provided a minimum rank level. I think I spent a day and a half on this question….it seemed simple enough; sort the player’s scores, group together the duplicates so that they can all be assigned the same rank, and return the number of scores that are eligible to level up.

If I have come away with one thing from this whole challenge it is to go study your algorithms (algos) kids!! This is what I will be doing to make sure that I understand them better, and that hopefully in the future I’m not nearly as stumped.

I know I’m not going to be the “best” or “highest ranked” applicant, but I hope that with the initiative that I have shown that maybe just maybe someone will take a chance on me.