Hello,
I am considering an offer from Target Corp, the retail giant. Does anyone know about the quality of their software engineering? For new grad they pay low $80k base in Minneapolis, which isn't bad but it isn't great.
I also have an offer from Epic Systems (Madison, WI) for around $110K base + stock and relocation. I have heard good things (good company to jump to FAANG, great pay starting out in LCOL area) and bad things (culture issues, bad WLB and turnover rate). The downside of Epic for me is mostly that I have to move.
I am willing to take the lower offer if my SWE learning would be better at Target than at Epic. My end goal is to reach FAANG or similar tech company in terms of TC and quality of engineering. I just don't know that much about Target to make a good decision, and since "Target" doesn't just refer to the retail company it's hard to search for.
Let me know any and all thoughts you have. They are much appreciated!
I am a current store side leader who’s been with Target for about 5 years now. I recently obtained my degree and applied for a software engineer position internally at Target. I have a hiring manager screen this week and was wondering if there were any software engineers here who could shed some light on the process, what I should expect, and how to best prepare for it. I wasn’t really able to find anything useful online so any help would be greatly appreciated
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I recently got a job offer from Target to join their software engineering TLP program in Minneapolis.
Is anyone else here joining Target this summer in the city?
Also, how much would be a reasonable salary for an entry level software engineer in Minneapolis?
Edit, little more about me:
I currently work for another company, however, i went to the career fair looking for better opportunities.
Target was a company at first I knew nothing about, and it was like meh why not.
I got an call to schedule an interview within few hours of leaving. One week later they wanted to fly me out to HQ in Minneapolis.
Between that time, we had a HackerRank challenge. (It was fun, and I didn't get all the test cases for question 2, but I left good comments on my code, and I still got the job)
At Minneapolis, the company placed us in a very decent hotel in middle of downtown. My first experience with the city, it's beautiful minus the cold. (However, majority of the buildings in downtown are connected by a second floor skyway. so you could literally wear shorts to work if your apartment building was connected.)
At HQ, our group was 9 folks. The company it self has a lot of diversity, which i enjoyed.
their is a total of 6 interviewers, and each person is assigned 2 people to interview with. So, 2 interviewers interview 3 people in total with some breaks in between. Basically they are ranking you, against another.
My interviewers asked me the same questions some how. And in both cases the interview became more of a conversation.
They emphasis: Why target a lot. More of the culture fit then technical skills. (I guess they see you have a CS degree from a top 10 school, and how you did on hackerrank)
The company overall, and campus looks amazing. And it's one reason why I'm strongly considering the offer.
After the interview they give you a bus tour of the city, which was really nice
I work at Target as a software engineer. I've been here for around two years. During that time they have had a pretty big push to hire domestic engineering talent and rely less heavily on contractors and Target India. Like someone else said, they are trying to change their reputation and generally modernize right now.
I really like working here but it is very specific on the team. I work with a number of talented, agreeable, and forward thinking people using modern technology . There are still many teams at Target that are not like that.
There are lots of legacy systems. There are teams that manage dependencies by e-mailing around jar files. Lots of technical workers from India of highly varying quality. There can sometimes be a somewhat combative relationship between teams in Minneapolis and teams in Bangalore. Much of the technical management chain reports up through Bangalore even for teams located entirely in Minneapolis.
It's also worth mentioning that many engineering teams are located at the Target North Campus which is in a suburb north of downtown by 20-25 minutes. Worse during rush hour. The campus is all self-contained so you wouldn't need to go outside in the cold during the day but the overall location is not anywhere near as nice as downtown Minneapolis. Again, I luckily work in downtown and probably would leave if they were to move us to TNC.
The good thing about the TLP program is that you do a few rotations on different teams and then get some degree of say in where you end up. I didn't go through it as I had a bit of experience when I started but I know some people that did. They have some horror stories to tell about some of their rotations but they ultimately ended up on teams that they are happy with.
On the subject of salary, I believe ~70k is fairly standard for the TLP program. That's not too uncommon for an entry level engineer in the Minneapolis area. You can afford a fairly comfortable lifestyle on that in the Twin Cities, especially if you're young with few financial responsibilities yet. I'm one level above entry level I think, maybe two, (Target has a ton of pay grades right now but will be shrinking them in the near future) and am making in the 90s but I entered Target in the 90s. I'm not sure how substantial a raise your first promotion or two out of the TLP program would be.
Generally I would say that Minneapolis is great if you can stand the cold. The suburbs aren't. 70k should be fine for now but ultimately as a software engineer in Minneapolis you can get more. Target is a huge company with plenty of good teams and plenty of bad teams. Luckily with the TLP program you would have some ability to seek out a good team.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
edit: one other thing since I saw that you were concerned about the layoffs, I don't know anyone in the tech org that got laid off. I know some people were but it wasn't very many compared to the rest of the company. Technology is an area that the company seems to be fairly committed to investing in at least for the time being. I certainly can't guarantee there won't be layoffs but I think that it'd be a huge mistake for them to reduce the number of non-legacy domestic technical workers any time soon and I suspect that management knows that.
First, congrats on the offer!
Second, I hope you get more answers than I did. I posted a thread less than a week ago and got no answers. Not much talk about Target here aside from internships from way back. There was some guy claiming it was a ton of unskilled H-1B workers there. Does that seem true?
I actually just completed a phone screen with them for their leadership program (I think that's TLP), so I'm hoping they'll hit me up again soon. What salary were you offered? And how were the onsite interviews?
Has anyone interned at Target before? Just got an offer (they call it Target Technology Services intern, but basically software engineering) for the summer. Couldn't find much information online about so wondering if someone here knows more about it.
What type question do they ask? How can I prepare for it?
Hello,
I'm a CS new grad with an offer for a Software Engineer position at Target in Minneapolis. It's not with the TLP program, it's for a particular team. This is the tech stack according to the job posting:
We aggregate billions of Kafka events a day using Kotlin/RocksDB microservices. These leverage machine learning-driven forecasts to determine what products are purchased and when they should be sent to our 1870+stores.
We power a variety of user experiences built with Electron/Typescript/React & Android Native/Kotlin stacks that are used daily on over 500k devices in our stores. These interact with a micro-services based architecture with edge computing at scale. This is the cornerstone of moving $100B+ in inventory per year.
We authorize millions of payment transactions per day for stores and digital checkout using persistent socket connections with Netty and the latest cryptographic standards to ensure payments are fast and secure!
We serve thousands of requests per second with Kotlin/Micronaut microservice REST APIs using PostgreSQL and Cassandra backends.
We value monitoring the health of thousands of VMs via Grafana dashboards hitting InfluxDB, and logging billions of events via Elasticsearch and Kibana.
Before negotiation, base salary is $80K. I have a competing offer for higher, so I will try to make this number higher before accepting (I would have to relocate for the competing offer). My question is this: is this good for an entry-level job? Does Target look good on a résumé, and will I learn relevant skills working with this tech stack? My career growth, learning, and development as an engineer is a top priority for me, and I was wondering if there are people here familiar with Target who could speak to that.
Thank you for the help!
Hi all,
I am up for a Senior Software Engineer UI Development position at Target and I was wondering if anyone else has been up for the same/similar role before? And if so, what was the hiring process like and is there anything I should focus on refreshing before any technical interviews?
When does the application for the Emerging Engineer Program (EEP) normally open?
https://jobs.target.com/emerging-engineer-program
Ever find an answer?
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Target gave me a job offer for being in specialty sales tech. I am a little uneasy leaving my other employer, and I just want to make sure I’m doing the right thing before I commit to all of this. What are your experiences with this position, and target as a company in general? I am looking at a part time position, and I will be working through the college semester as I commute to school.
Any other developers here? How's life?
Hi Solutions Engineers! I'm in the process of interviewing for an SE position. I have a general idea of the target compensation I want to shoot for, but I don't want to leave money on the table or push myself out of the process. Especially since the range is like 121,030 - $287,210
Can anyone share what their salary was going into the role? Looks like the typical is 119k - 141k in my area.
I'm looking at 125k as a target base to match my current salary. I'd honestly be happy to take 90 at this point but want to just make the right choice. Is that too high?
I searched Glassdoor and this subreddit but wasn't seeing what I was looking for, especially since the job market has fluctuated so much.
*Sorry if this is not allowed - I didn't see anything in the rules. I can take it down if it is.
I got an offer from Target for a 10 week program this summer. However, there seems to be very little information on what interns do there. To anyone who has done the internship program:
Did you like it? What were the best/worst parts?
What technologies did you use?
What percentage of your fellow interns got return offers/what were the details of the offer?
Anything you can think of to prep for the internship?
Past employee here, have software engineering internships for Target Corporate already closed up?
Have been checking nearly every day for a bit now.