I've done internships at YC startups, Delphi, and Cluely. All legitimate companies. All looked great on my LinkedIn.
And here's what I learned: brand-name internships are resume decorations that teach you almost nothing about building real things.
I'm not saying internships are worthless. I'm saying the value you think you're getting—learning how successful companies operate, building skills, getting mentorship—is mostly fiction. What you're actually getting is a line on your resume and maybe some basic exposure to corporate tools.
The entire internship economy is built on a misunderstanding of how learning actually works.
What you think you're learning
When you land an internship at a famous company, you think you're going to:
Learn how world-class teams ship products
Get mentored by senior people who've built at scale
Understand how successful companies operate
Build skills that transfer to your own projects
What actually happens:
You get assigned low-stakes tasks that won't break anything if you mess up. You attend meetings where decisions were already made. You shadow people who are too busy to actually teach you. You spend half your time figuring out internal tools and processes that don't exist anywhere else.
The actual learning curve
Here's what a typical internship looks like:
Week 1-2: Onboarding. Setting up accounts. Learning internal tools. Meetings explaining how things work.
Week 3-6: Getting assigned your "project." It's either something they couldn't prioritize or a contained task with no real impact.
Week 7-10: Working on said project with minimal feedback because everyone's busy.
Week 11-12: Presenting your work. Everyone's polite. Your project goes into a folder somewhere and is never looked at again.
Compare that to building your own thing:
Week 1: Ship something broken. Get immediate user feedback that it's broken.
Week 2: Fix what's broken. Ship again. Get feedback it's less broken but still not good.
Week 3-12: Iterate based on real users with real problems who will actually use (or not use) what you build.
One of these teaches you how to build. The other teaches you how to navigate corporate bureaucracy.
The mentorship myth
Internships sell themselves on mentorship. "Work alongside experienced engineers!" "Learn from senior product leaders!"
In reality, senior people at successful companies are extremely busy. They don't have time to mentor interns in any meaningful way. You might get 30 minutes a week in a 1-on-1 where you discuss your project and they give vague encouragement.
That's not mentorship. That's management.
Real mentorship is someone spending hours with you explaining why certain decisions matter, showing you how they think through problems, giving you feedback that actually hurts because it's true.
Most internship "mentors" are just making sure you don't break anything and that you have enough to put in your final presentation.
What you're actually getting
Here's the honest value proposition of brand-name internships:
1. Resume signal. Future employers see "Interned at [Famous Company]" and assume you're competent.
2. Basic exposure. You see how big companies work, which is useful context even if you learn nothing actionable.
3. Network access. You meet people who work at impressive places, some of whom might be useful later.
4. Proof you can navigate corporate environments. Which matters if you want a corporate job.
None of these are about learning to build things. They're about credentialing and signaling.
Why building your own thing is better
When I compare what I learned at internships versus what I learned building Nexus, it's not even close.
Internships taught me:
How to use specific internal tools
How to write docs that match their template
How to present work in their format
How to operate within their bureaucracy
Building Nexus taught me:
How to ship products that actually work
How to talk to customers and figure out what they need
How to debug production issues at 3 AM
How to make technical decisions when there's no senior engineer to ask
How to iterate based on market feedback, not internal politics
The skill gap is massive. And the frustrating part is that the internship looks more impressive on paper while teaching less.
The trap of optimization
Smart students optimize for internships because they're legible achievements. You can list them. You can tell your parents about them. College admissions understands them.
Building your own thing is illegible. How do you explain on an application that you spent summer building an AI agent platform? Do you mention the revenue? The users? The technical architecture? None of it fits the standard format.
So students chase internships instead of building, and they end up with resumes full of brand names but no actual capability to create things from scratch.
What you should do instead
If you want to learn how to build things, the path is obvious: build things.
Not as an intern where someone gives you a contained project with guardrails. As a founder where you're responsible for everything and failure means the thing doesn't exist.
Ship something. Get users. Iterate. That's the entire curriculum.
Will it look as good on your resume as "Software Engineering Intern at Google"? Probably not. Will you learn 10x more? Absolutely.
The students who figure this out early—who realize that building beats interning for skill development—end up so far ahead that by the time they're 25, the internship resume people are trying to catch up.
The exception
There's one type of internship that's actually valuable: the kind where you're given real responsibility early.
If you're at a 10-person startup and they let you ship to production in week one, that's learning. If you're building features that real users depend on, that's learning. If you're making decisions that matter and seeing the consequences, that's learning.
But that's not what happens at brand-name companies. At brand-name companies, you're insulated from risk, which means you're insulated from learning.
— Arjun