Pros
Working for Visa was a very fun experience. My team was nice and had a lot of interesting problems to work on. I had the freedom to solve a problem at any different angle and my team loved it. With this freedom, it gives you the opportunity to learn alot. Your also exposed to alot of hot tools, such as Spark and Hadoop. Overall, I felt that I had a very significant impact on my team and I felt very accomplished after the internship. Also, work was not too stressful and there were very few times that I had to overwork. Also, Visa provided housing, which was good. You get placed in front of a beautiful lake. I told my housing consultant that I wanted my own room, but instead, I had to share it with somebody. I especially loved working with the other interns at my team. They were smart, fast and fun to hang out with. In terms of social atmosphere, it was fun hanging out with the other interns in the Foster City campus. The full-times seemed to be very relaxed and easy to talk to. They are interested in talking to you as a person. Also, Visa had a lot of intern events starting around late June to end of July. Overall, it was a very fun experience. After interning at Visa, I interned at a giant tech company (FLAG). It did not have the same atmosphere as Visa. It was difficult to talk to the full-time employees. They did not offer many intern events like Visa. My mentor at this company did not give me a lot of instructions or answered my questions thoroughly which blocked me alot and it turned out that I have to redesign my code, which was frustrating. This was not a matter of skill, but many interns in my team had this issue as well. I was working on a hot product, but I did not feel I learned too much from it or made a significant feature. This might be just all pure luck, but working at Visa a good experience and I think it is comparable to many other giant tech companies. If you got an offer from FLAG and Visa, consider Visa as a top choice.
Cons
- Salary for my internship was average (especially for my title) and wished it was a bit higher. - Food was not free, but it was healthy and the price was subsidized ($6-$7 a meal) - Production maybe slow because of how it is structured as a finance company.