Reflections on Week 1 at RV Tech

I am lucky enough to land an internship at RV Tech (Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies). Getting an internship is hard these days, especially if you are an international student. I’m writing this series (hopefully I can keep it going until the end of my internship) for three reasons:

1. Writing things down helps me internalize what I learned that week.
2. These posts act as a memo so that in the future I can use them to prepare for interviews, especially behavioral ones.
3. I think writing clearly will be a crucial skill for software engineers. AI is going to handle more and more of the coding, but engineers still need to communicate effectively, with LLMs and with people. And writing clearly means you can think clearly.

Let’s talk about my team. I’m on the OTA Cloud team, which is figuring out how to deliver software/firmware updates to cars. I knew it was an important team (if something goes wrong, we could potentially brick or cause harm to cars, or even worse…) but after I joined I realized OTA is far more important than what I thought. OTA is not only a way to update our customers’ cars, it is also important for testing internally. Every time a team wants to test a feature or fix a bug, they have to go through our system to push the update to real hardware. In other words, we have to deal with external customers and internal customers at the same time.

Our team is all senior and staff engineers, which makes sense: we don’t want our OTA system to fail. That also puts pressure on me, knowing how big the gap is between them and me.

Communication is not about getting the grammar right, it is about expressing the idea clearly

One thing I still struggle with, even though I have lived in the US for nearly a year, is that I can’t get all the grammar correct when I speak. Sometimes, after I say a sentence, I question myself — wait, should I use this word instead of that word? Is it verb-ing or just the verb? Then I noticed something on our team: we have engineers with years of experience who are non-native speakers like me, and they still slip on grammar now and then. They are great engineers who have made real contributions to the team. In the end, it all comes down to one thing: did the other person understand the point I wanted to convey?

Being proactive

I still hesitate to tag someone in Slack or message them directly. I don’t want to interrupt them when they might be busy. My mentor tells me to just message them, no need to wait. Communication through Slack is async: it is like sending a notification, not an interruption.

Working remotely is hard

The hardest adjustment is asking for help remotely. Most of the team works remotely, and we do all our meetings over Zoom. Before, if I encountered a complex problem, I would take my laptop, walk to someone’s desk, and show them. Now I have to put the whole problem into words and screenshots. Writing too much detail is not a good idea since they are busy, but writing too little means they will have to ask follow-up questions to get a better picture. So: what is the quickest and most efficient way to make sure we are on the same page so that I can further explain the problem I am facing? This is the art of asking questions, and I will have to keep learning it for my whole career.