Why We Expanded our Internship Program this Year

Why We Expanded our Internship Program this Year

I read a lot of articles about company culture. Best practices, lessons learned, the definitive guide to building early career talent. More often than I would like to admit, I get halfway through one and think, we have been doing that for years. We rarely say so, which is partly the nature of this place and partly me. We’re humble and prefer our work, and its impact, to speak for itself.

I am making an exception here, because I’m so proud of our early in career program and the impact these Twilions made throughout the summer. Despite being a remote first company, we still flew every intern to their regional hub, whether that was San Francisco, Dublin or Bangalore, for onboarding, and then back again at the end for our intern showcase. It is the most expensive and logistically heavy line item we have for our intern program, and it is the last thing I would cut. I want to explain why.

Before you have earned it

At some point, someone has to decide you are worth a chance before you have fully earned it. It does not have to be your first job or your second. It’s most ideal if it happens early enough that the habits you build start compounding.

Mine came at a consulting firm I loved, in a people function that had a hard ceiling on it. Recruiting was the only role there with a real path attached to it. Everything else in HR was treated as administrative support for the business rather than a career of its own, so there was nowhere to go if you wanted to build one. Leaving in my mid-twenties meant walking away from colleagues and a social life I had built around that job, and I could only do it because enough people there had invested in me that I believed I could land somewhere else.

What our Twilio interns actually built

Two of this summer's cohort really stuck with me, because their work highlights the breadth of Twilio.

Jakob, a rising senior at the University of Central Florida, spent the summer with our developer network team. Our customers talk to us constantly on Reddit and Discord, and almost none of that was reaching the people who could act on it. Jakob built a dashboard that pulls those conversations in, sorts them by sentiment, and routes the recurring themes to product teams, turning roughly four thousand interactions from more than two thousand people into a list of what is top of mind/reoccuring feedback from our customers. During Tweek, our annual company-wide hack week, he led a team that included principal engineers and his own managers, and they built an in-house replacement for a third party tool our developer advocates had been relying on every day, wired into Twilio’s own command line tools.

Justine, a new grad from the University of Oregon, joined our brand and creative team as a design intern and designed a mechanical keyboard. A physical one, Twilio themed, taken from her sketches through mockup and print production alongside one of our illustrators, now being manufactured for a developer conference giveaway.

Best of all we put the mechanical keyboard to work for a Programmer’s Day social giveaway, inviting developers to share their weirdest bug they’d spent way too long fixing for a chance to win one. The result? Over 100 submissions and one of our most highly engaged X posts of the year.

What I love about these examples is how each of them embodied our Twilio Magic of “Owning the Outcome” and “Ask ‘What If?’” By using their creativity and having determination, each had an outsized impact at Twilio.

Back to those two onboarding weeks

Justine spent her two weeks in San Francisco, and came in knowing very little about Twilio. Those two weeks were what made her feel connected enough to want to do right by the place. Without them, she told us, the remote months would have felt isolating. Her cohort still texts and calls every week, including the people she never worked with.

That is not a perk. Early in your career you learn an enormous amount by overhearing things, watching how someone more experienced works a problem, and asking small questions without booking a meeting for them. You cannot do much of that alone on a laptop.

The ones who do not stay

Whether this summer’s cohort starts their career with us or not, it’s fulfilling to know they walked away with real experience, exposure to leadership, and a great foundation to launch from. Some of the people who leave will come back to us as experienced hires years from now. Some will carry Twilio into whatever company they join next and build on the platform because they already know what it can do. Others will simply tell people this was a good place to start.

My ambition is for Twilio to be known as one of the best places in this industry to workand for the people who trained here to become a network worth being part of long after they leave. A reputation like that gets built one person at a time, which is exactly why each of these 12 week stretches is worth the effort we put into it. Watching someone you helped develop go do well somewhere else is one of the better parts of this job.

All of that said, we do want people to stay. While we have a number of stats that give us confidence in our program, the one I’m most proud of is that 93% said the internship has given them more confidence about starting their careers as a result of the skills they’ve learnt during their time with us. This gives us confidence that we are setting up our interns for success as they transition from campus to career.

And for those early in career: Know that the market you are walking into is harder than it should be, and none of that is a reflection of you. Find the people willing to take a chance, and then make it impossible for them to regret it. That is what this summer looked like from where I sat, and I would take that bet again next year.

To learn more about our careers, visit: https://jobs.twilio.com/careers

Christy Lake is the Chief Administrative Officer of Twilio, where she leads the company’s global People and Legal teams. She is responsible for driving the talent development and acquisition strategy and overseeing all global legal matters, including corporate governance, and government affairs. Christy brings over 25 years of experience, including as Senior Vice President and Chief People Officer at Box. Prior to Box, she held human resources leadership positions at Medallia, HP Software and The Home Depot.