I created a complete guide on how I would recommend university students to land an internship and become a software engineer. Hope this helps.

See the guide here

Feel free to let me know if there is anything else I should add to the document.

Ask me any questions and I'll answer them as well.

I was just minding my business when I wondered, if you wanted to be the top of the top, the cream of the crop then what would that look like and so I went to prompting. Anyways, I tried a few prompts but ended up on this one - "IN TERMS OF RESUME VALUE, MAKE A HIERARCHY OF ALL THE COMPANIES YOU FEEL SHOULD BE INCLUDED AS INCLUSIVE AS POSSIBLE NO MATTER HOW LENGTHY." I had caps lock on, anyways here's the list and I wanted to see what were yall's thoughts on it was :

TIER S – God-Tier / Career-Maker:

Big Tech:

Google (SWE/AI), Meta, Apple, Amazon (AWS, Robotics, Search), Netflix (Security/Infra)

Quant & Trading:

Jane Street, Citadel / Citadel Securities, Two Sigma, Hudson River Trading (HRT), IMC Trading, Jump Trading, DRW, Optiver, Renaissance Technologies, Jump Crypto, Radix Trading, Wintermute, GSR, dYdX Trading, Uniswap Labs, Flashbots, Numerai

SIG (Susquehanna International Group), Tower Research Capital, Five Rings Capital, Akuna Capital

AI Research Labs:

OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, FAIR (Meta AI), Google DeepMind, Microsoft Research, Apple ML, xAI, Allen Institute for AI (AI2), ARC (Alignment Research Center)

EleutherAI, Mistral AI

High-Impact Startups:

Stripe, Roblox, Palantir, Figma, Snowflake, Databricks, Replit, Scale AI, Notion, Cohere, Character.AI, Perplexity.AI, Hugging Face, Runway ML, LangChain, Vercel, Linear, Hive AI

Multiverse, Snorkel AI

Other:

Valve, Blue Origin, Recurse Center

X (formerly Google X)

TIER A – Elite:

Tech Giants:

Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, VMware, Atlassian, Workday, Adobe, Intel, IBM, Cisco, Dell, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, ASML, Epic Systems, MongoDB, Datadog, TikTok / ByteDance, Snap Inc., Postman, Quora, Dropbox, Zillow, Booking.com

Finance/Fintech:

Goldman Sachs (Engineering), JPMorgan Chase (SWE Program), Morgan Stanley (Tech/Quant), Bank of America (Global Tech), Capital One (Tech Dev), American Express (Tech Analyst), Stripe Treasury, Square (Block), Adyen, Affirm, Brex, Ramp, PayPal, Robinhood

Plaid, Mercury

Cloud & Infra:

Cloudflare, HashiCorp, Fastly, DigitalOcean, Confluent, Elastic (Elasticsearch), Tailscale, ClickHouse, Fivetran, Airbyte

Fly.io, Render, Railway, Supabase, PlanetScale, Neon

Red Hat, Cockroach Labs

Dev Tools / SaaS:

Retool, Linear, dbt Labs, Notion, Airtable, Vercel, Sentry, Amplitude, Teleport

Weights & Biases, Pinecone, Anyscale

PostHog, Sourcegraph, GitLab, Coder

Security:

CrowdStrike, Okta, Trail of Bits

Mandiant, Proton AG

NCC Group

Deep Tech/Autonomous:

SpaceX (Software/Avionics), Tesla (Autopilot/AI), Cruise, Waymo, Nuro, Aurora Innovation, Anduril, Skydio, Boston Dynamics

Relativity Space, Zipline

Government/Defense Research:

NASA (JPL, Ames, Langley), MITRE, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, Brookhaven, Los Alamos, DARPA-Linked Programs

TIER B – Strong:

Fortune 100s:

General Electric (GE), Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing

Consumer Tech:

Target Tech, Walmart Global Tech, PepsiCo (IT), Nike (Data/Tech), Procter & Gamble (Analytics), Johnson & Johnson (IT), General Motors (Software), Indeed, Glassdoor, Intuit, ServiceNow, Jet Propulsion Lab (General IT)

Spotify, Hulu, Crunchyroll, Paramount Tech

Next-Wave Startups:

Gusto, Mercury, Plaid, Vanta, Rippling, Descript, ElevenLabs, Zotero, Obsidian, Discord, Reddit, Duolingo, Asana, Dropbox, Khan Academy, Canva, Recurse Center, Weights & Biases, Stability AI, MosaicML, Lightning AI, Unity, Riot Games, Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, The Browser Company (Arc), Khan Lab School, Minerva, Sentry, Teleport

Supercell, Niantic, Epic Games, Primer, Outlier.org, Lambda School / BloomTech

Deepgram, BigML

Healthcare Tech:

Flatiron Health, Tempus, Komodo Health, Aledade, Butterfly Network

Quantum/Hardware:

SiFive, Cerebras Systems, Rigetti Computing, Graphcore, Groq

Civic/Scientific Tech:

Allen Institute (Bio), Y Combinator Research

Simons Foundation, Broad Institute, Allen Institute for Brain Science, Janelia Research Campus (HHMI), Code for America, Internet Archive, New America Foundation

TIER C – Solid Experience, Local/Niche:

University Research Labs, Local Startups, State/City Government IT, Museums/Non-profits, Hospital Tech Departments, Contract/Freelance SWE, Hackathons, Open Source Projects, Small Agencies/Consultancies, EdTechs like Edpuzzle/Brilliant/Mathigon, Scientific Publishing (e.g., arXiv), State Data Portals / Crime Labs / Health Tech

BONUS – Prestige Programs (Non-Internship but Resume Boosters):

Kleiner Perkins Fellows, Google CSSI, Meta University, MLH Fellowship, Code2040, Rewriting the Code, Uber Uplift, Tetra Fellowship, Thiel Fellowship, Insight Fellows, Fellowship.ai, Cohere For AI Research, AI4ALL, MLCommons / Hugging Face Fellows, Insight Data Engineering Fellowships, F8 Refresh, DeepMind UGRP, Recurse Center, Open Source Promotion Plan (OSPP)

Z Fellows, ML Collective, AIcrowd, First Round Fast Track, a16z Crypto Startup School

So yea that's the list I was given, I wanted to see the public opinion on it