Onboarding was July 1st, in the office tower above MIXC Qianhai. It’s very close to my home — a few minutes on my little scooter and I’m there, which is the most overpowered part of this entire internship (a five-minute commute for an eight-hour workday!). O counts as a big hardware company, but for a software person it may not be the most central place to be. I was assigned to the Software Engineering division, the Camera group under System Integration Development, mainly dealing with the camera’s assorted weird problems.
The first few days were mostly about learning the internal workflows. O’s internal documentation system is superbly done — so good that at times I wonder: could making documentation itself become the bottleneck of work efficiency? But the fact is, producing excellent documentation does carry a minor KPI of its own. The first two weeks after onboarding are mostly reading the tutorials left behind by predecessors — in truth there’s no way to finish reading them, not within the internship period anyway; they’re just too exhaustive. Add my genuine prior unfamiliarity with things like the Camera2 API, and my level is basically “read as far as I get.”
Paid Self-Study
O’s output expectations for interns aren’t high. At the start I just familiarized myself with the workflows while doing odd jobs — flashing devices, unlocking bootloaders, running tests, that sort of thing. O’s attendance policy is also loose: flexible GPS check-ins from your phone, and time you owe in the morning can be paid back in the afternoon. So I’ve mostly been sitting in a chill state of paid self-study.
Recently I was handed some tasks of the “UI effect doesn’t match expectations” flavor, which I’m getting around to fixing. Working away, I get the feeling that I’m essentially a bridge between Cursor and the desired effect. Speaking of Cursor, the team provided a team account; the quota isn’t very transparent, but it seems hard to pedal your way to the cap — you can even pick fable! The team overall is very busy, lots of issues handled daily, and with a new major release shipping lately, that’s fair enough.
A Degree Factory
One day O bussed our batch of interns out to the Binhaiwan base for a full day of intern-exclusive corporate-culture classes. That Binhaiwan campus is beautifully built — a very modern, park-style work environment.
It was also on that day that I discovered O is, surprisingly, a degree factory. The school floor sits at the “Mid-Nine” tier (the C9-adjacent mid-pack), HIT grads cluster in bunches, the Hua Five (the top East China schools) are plenty too, and the overall mix skews master’s degrees. Apparently I alone was parading around wearing the title of double-non (non-985/non-211) “emperor” undergrad. Funnily enough, though, the senior at the meet-the-seniors session turned out to be from SUSTech too — a 2024 master’s student in Materials Science. Maybe O just has a soft spot for SUSTech.
Judging from the headcount and the training setup, O seems to genuinely want us to convert to full-time; everything gives off an air of taking this seriously.
The Intern Cohort
Got to know a few fellow interns; they all seem pretty solid, and chatting goes smoothly — maybe the interview screening really did its job.
The most remarkable one works on kernel optimization: Zhejiang University undergrad in ocean engineering, two years of work experience, then cross-examined into Nanjing University for software — and because of the work history, ByteDance HR insta-rejected him. There’s also one who used to work at DiDi, now doing a low-effort master’s at City University of Hong Kong and casually picking up this internship on the side.
Postscript
To be honest, I have no conversion pressure whatsoever — I always treated this as the first lesson in socialization. The only surprise is that the work my group does is almost identical to the process taught in the university software engineering course: code reviews, smoke tests, that sort of thing. Which, come to think of it, means I did underrate that software engineering course a bit too much before. In the old family-workshop coding scenario, one person plus an unlimited API really could turn you into your own superhero. But in a real industrial environment, especially at a hardware-leaning company like this, the cost of code going wrong is enormous, so process and standards become critically important — maybe that’s the whole point of software engineering.
…kind of eyeing the agent roles with envy now…