Here's How After Few Months Of Coding, My Friend Got An Internship At Tesla



“Hey, you’re Elon’s best friend now, huh?” I asked my friend, who has been interning at Tesla for the past 3 months.

“You have no idea. For a few hours, my desk was like five meters from Elon’s.”

“No fucking way” I shouted.

“It’s true. The first day they were like ‘here is your desk’. I literally freaked out. I think Elon could have read my code if he wanted. I quickly managed to change desks though.”

“Man, that’s insane. How many months do you have left? You started, like, in September, right?”

“Yeah, I’ve got, like, 3 months left.”

“But how did you manage to get a work permit in the US? Didn’t you start with a tourist visa?”

“It’s a long story. I tried…”

“Please, tell me. I want to know it all.”

“[laughs] Really? Everything?”

He then went on explaining the full story.

The Starfleet Program

“So, on January 2018, I took this plane to 42 Silicon Valley. My dad could only give me the minimum money to pay the rent (an Airbnb). For the first months, all my money went into this Airbnb. I had almost nothing left to eat. I would eat half a taco a day, and sometimes pasta. That’s it.”

“That’s some crazy shit, man. In fact, it’s not that far from the story of the Airbnb co-founders that didn’t even have enough money to pay rent.” I said.

“Yeah, tough times. I was so hungry I stopped giving a fuck. I would ask to see the director of the Starfleet program, and ask him, like, ‘can I join your thing’, and he would refuse every time. I only had a 6 months tourist visa, but the Starfleet program is one-year long. At some point, he got tired of saying no, and eventually accepted.”

“You’re an absolute mad lad. You never quit dude. You’re fucking insane.”

“When you are broke and hungry, it’s not that difficult to ask for what you want. I came all the way back from France. I needed to get into this Starfleet program . I was dying for 24/7 coding and a Silicon Valley job.”

“Makes sense.”

“Then, a few months after I got accepted into this Starfleet program, one of my friends that knew quite well the executive team asked if I could have a dorm room. They quickly looked at my projects before accepting it. I think they quickly understood that I was a serious guy. From this point onwards, I had more cash to spend on food, and I could dedicate all my time to coding.”

The work environment at 42.

“At this point, we had an insane amount of work to do. I remember having to do corewar [a VM project that usually takes a month to complete], 42sh [one of the hardest shell projects] and the PHP piscine [two weeks of intense PHP challenges] at the same time. We stayed up all night to finish our projects. One of our traditions was that one guy would buy food for everyone at 5 am. It was crazy.”

“You’ve got no idea how jealous I am” I uttered....

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