Autodesk Revisited

“Don’t burn bridges” they say. “You never know when you might need them” they tell me. And so, like a death row inmate hoping for a last-minute pardon that never comes, I’ve had this post in my drafts for more than 2 months now, never quite sure if I should hit the publish button.

Truth is a curious thing. It’s not always what you want to hear. It’s not always what you want to say. But it’s always there — lurking in the shadows, waiting to be told by someone — anyone — with just a shred of integrity.

So here I am

Summary for those in a hurry

There’s a reason I’ve added a redirect to this page from https://thetrio.dev/rant — because it is in fact a long and rambling rant.

So for those in a hurry, I’ll summarize the whole thing — I was an intern at Autodesk for the first 6 months of 2024. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as expected with me being thrown into a project without a technical mentor.

I had no one to answer my questions and my superiors either gaslit me or straight up mocked and chastised me for every little thing.

I broke down several times in the office, and countless more times at home. I was left feeling like I was the problem — that I was the one who was incompetent and not cut out for the job.

Thankfully, I had plenty of support from the rest of the interns and several employees aware of my situation.

But no one — not one person — in a position of power did anything to make things better.

Now on to the whole story. Because believe me, it gets worse.

A lot worse.

How it happened

Autodesk visited our college for campus placements in October last year. I had to clear an online test and 3 rounds of interviews but within a few days, the fate of my next 6 months was sealed — I was going to be in the Autodesk Pune office from January 8, 2024.

Early Days

The first few weeks were all about meeting the interns and everyone else at the office. To say that my first week was packed with social events would be an understatement — I frankly cannot recall a single day in that week when I didn’t go out. Be it having a dinner with all the managers, visiting the nearby mall with a few interns, or having the flagship annual Autodesk party at Conrad. The first week was the best start I could’ve hoped for — no work pressure and all the time in the world to see so many new faces.

Little did I know how downhill it would go from there.

The Work Begins

With everything settled after the first week, I was finally hoping to get to know exactly which team I would be working with and what I would be working on. Fast forward to 3 weeks later, and I’m still as clueless as I was on the first day. All I had been told was that there were two teams I could be a part of and that because of some constraints, I would have a different acting manager than the one I was supposed to have.

Now here’s the deal — in all these 3 weeks, I was left completely alone. No scrum meetings, no standups, no nothing.

I was told I would be assigned a mentor/buddy who would help me get started but that never happened. When I pointed this out to my acting manager, he simply said that he was my buddy. And he proceeded to give me a task that was so vague that I had no idea where to even begin. There wasn’t any JIRA about it, we didn’t even have a meeting to discuss it. I was just sent a Slack message and that was it.

But I was determined to make the most of it. I started working on the task and within a few days, I thought I had made a breakthrough. But to test it out, I needed to push the code to the repository. And that’s when I found out that I didn’t have access to do that. I asked my acting manager about it and he said he would look into it.

I didn’t get the access for another month.

The Scrum

I was however finally assigned a team and had daily scrums. I thought this would be the turning point — sure, my acting manager was too busy to help me out but at least I would have a team to guide me.

That wasn’t to be.

The tasks that I was assigned were created by my acting manager and no one on the team had any clue about them.

I think I made fairly good progress on these tasks given that I was working alone and only had my acting manager — who wasn’t that technical — to discuss it with. But sooner or later, I knew I would hit a roadblock. And when that would happen, I would have no one to turn to — not because people weren’t willing to help but because my work was so isolated that no one else could be of any help unless they were willing to spend hours googling the same things I was. Which is too much to ask of anyone who isn’t your mentor.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Cry for Help

By this time, more than half of my internship was over and I had nothing to show for it. It was the end of March and my Github contributions looked the same as they did on the first day — empty.

Without anyone with whom I could bounce ideas, I was stuck, always second-guessing myself. Not only that, I was also starting to wonder if these tasks were even feasible — and even if they were, were they worth it? And soon, I hit a wall. This time I couldn’t even see a way around it.

But fortunately, a few people took notice of my task and offered to help. The irony of course was that they weren’t on my team — they weren’t even based in India. But they were willing to help and that meant the world to me.

I got on a few calls with some of these people and we spent hours trying to figure out what was wrong. It took us a while — like I said repeatedly, these tasks weren’t trivial, certainly not for an intern — but we finally managed to get it working. I was ecstatic — I had finally made some progress.

But that was short-lived.

We soon discovered another issue - and this wasn’t something we could work around. Fixing it would involve updating a dependency for a core service used by the entire company. No way was that going to happen in the time I had left. I tried to point this out to my acting manager but he didn’t seem to understand — he seemed to think that I was just making excuses.

In the end, I ended up convincing him by showing him my conversation with a Principal Engineer based somewhere outside India — one of the few people who had helped me out.

He finally agreed to let me work on something else. With barely a little over a month left in the internship, I was quite nervous knowing that what I had worked on for the past 4 or so months was not even completed — but I hoped against hope that my sincere efforts in trying to see this through wouldn’t go unnoticed.

How wrong I was.

The Interview

I was told that I would be having an interview to decide if I would be given a full-time offer. By this time, I was almost certain that I wouldn’t be getting one. But I was determined to give it my best shot. I spent literal days preparing for it. But I knew all was lost the moment I joined the call.

My interview was being conducted by my acting manager.

I won’t go into the details of the interview but suffice to say, it was a disaster. I imagine this is what happens when you ask a manager to interview someone for a technical role. I was left showing him Google searches to prove that my answers weren’t wrong despite him insisting that I was. I assume that’s what set him off. He was visibly annoyed and made one final punch - he asked me if I had ever written a single line of Java code in my life, and whether I’d even be able to write a Hello World program in it.

It was at this point that I seriously considered pressing the leave button on Zoom. Yet I didn’t. I sat through the rest of the interview, answered his questions as best as I could, and then asked him how he thought it went.

He said I had done terribly — it was then that I finally pressed the leave button.

The Grudge

Soon thereafter, I was told that I wouldn’t be getting a full-time offer. I was devastated. I knew this was coming but that didn’t prepare me for the reality of it. I had spent the last 6 months working on something that was never going to see the light of day, through no fault of my own.

I was angry, I was sad, I was frustrated. But most of all, I was disappointed. I had always wanted to work at Autodesk — it was a dream come true when I got the offer. But now, I was left wondering if it was all worth it.

But if I thought the worst was over, I was wrong. I soon had to deal with what I would consider pretty unprofessional behavior from my acting manager. He told other interns how much he tried to get me a job but that I didn’t give him anything to work with. He refused to even give me any feedback — something other managers provided to their interns every week. He even told me that were I to focus on interviewing for other companies and spend a little less time on my tasks, he would have to lower my feedback even further. I wasn’t even spared in the office — I was hunted by him and asked to tell him exactly what I had worked on that day. This level of micromanagement was something I had never experienced before.

Fighting Back

While I knew I wasn’t going to get a full-time offer, I was determined to make the most of the time I had left. I wanted everyone to know what I had gone through — not because I wanted to get back at my acting manager but because I wanted to make sure that no future intern had to go through what I did.

People kept telling me that I shouldn’t speak up, that I should just let it go. But I couldn’t. I had to speak up. I had to make sure that my voice was heard.

I had a call with my recruiter and told them everything that had happened. They were shocked — they had no idea that this was happening. They told me that they would look into it and get back to me.

They never did.

But I didn’t want to give up. I scheduled a meeting with my manager — the one I was supposed to have but never did. I didn’t know what to expect but I was hopeful. I started by telling him how I wasn’t assigned a mentor, how no one on my team was aware of my tasks, and how I was left alone to fend for myself.

I was expecting him to be shocked, to be apologetic. But he wasn’t. He was dismissive. He told me that they want interns who don’t need to be assigned a mentor. That assigning a mentor lowers the overall productivity of the team.

I was speechless. Not only did other teams assign mentors to their interns, but it was also company policy to do so. When one of the VPs at Autodesk came to visit the Autodesk Pune office, he specifically asked the interns if everyone had been assigned a mentor. You might wonder why I didn’t say anything then — believe me, I wanted to.

But my manager had told me that if I were to say this publicly, it might put a lot of blame on my acting manager and that he would try to solve this internally. I trusted him. I trusted that he would do the right thing.

He never did.

Acceptance

I’m not sure how to feel. I made some incredible friends here — not only among the interns but also among the full-time employees. It’s just a shame that my managers weren’t one of them.

I have no bad blood with Autodesk — I still think it’s a great company to work for. I just had the misfortune of being surrounded by those who aren’t the most welcoming. Now that I look back at it, I find it unsettling that one person can have such a huge impact on your life — both professionally and personally. But when that one person is your manager/mentor/buddy/scrum-master all rolled into one, anything is possible.

This blog barely scratches the surface of what I went through. For every incident I’ve mentioned here, there are countless others that I’ve left out.

But so is life when you ruffle the feathers of the powers that be.

Conclusion

I’ve always hated it when people crib and complain about not clearing an interview or not getting a job after the fact. It feels like they’re just trying to find someone to blame for their own shortcomings.

Yet here I am.

Which is why I know that this entire post might just sound like the cribbings of an intern who didn’t get a full-time offer.

So take it with a grain of salt. Maybe I made everything up — there’s no proof I can provide to show that I didn’t. But I know what I went through — I know how I felt. And so do the several lovely folks at the Pune office who were there to witness and support me through it all.

And that’s all that matters.