My First Time Signing an Offer Letter!

Before the long story, I would like to tell you that I’ve signed an internship offer letter from tiket.com, a week ago. Alhamdulillah ‘ala kulli haal. For many people perhaps this company’s profile needs no introduction, but for those who aren’t yet familiar, tiket.com is an Online Travel Agent (OTA) company. But there is an interesting story that occurs between Friday and Monday (the day I signed the offer), and I will tell you about that.

Friday, 23 July 2021

I woke up in the morning, not feeling well. I was feeling feverish and that made me sleep again till 9. But two things come to my mind, first is the technical assessment (from tiket.com) deadline which was at 12 noon, second is my interview schedule with Smartfren at 11.30 AM. That pushed me to get up as soon as possible because I knew that technical assessment wouldn’t take a little amount of time and I have no option but to do the test at that time since the deadline to start the assessment was at 12 and I wasn’t going to take a risk. I started the technical assessment at 09.45, and you know what? I’ve found out that the test is going to take 2 hours and 40 minutes, which means that it will clash with my interview schedule at 11.30. This was something that made me feel bad, but there’s nothing I could do but finishing the test as fast as possible.

At 11.30, I still have around one hour left, but I’ve finished four out of five problems. “Not bad”, I thought. I just submitted it, and the score was there, 72 out of 100. Even though it was a decent grade, I still regretted it.

You don’t regret it when things are not working. You regret it when you didn’t give your everything, even things seem to be just fine.

I hoped that I would pass the test.

Okay, move on to the interview. It was with Smartfren, as I’ve already said before. I was applying to a Big Data Engineer intern position there. The interview was, more like, technical interview rather than a behavioral one. I was asked about some pieces of knowledge on Database Concepts and some simple SQL queries. A pretty decent interview, for a first-timer like me that time. Yes, it was my first ever job interview.

At 14.00 the same day, I received an email from Smartfren, which told me that they found some interest in my CV and decided to give me an offer. “First offer” after a “first interview”, success rate 100% hahaha. Alhamdulilah. I was pretty sure that I was going to take that internship opportunity before the night came.

That night, tiket.com, through their talent acquisition intern, contacted me to tell me that I will be processed to the next stage, which was the interview on Monday. I was feeling really great, it was such a pleasure to get that opportunity, as tiket.com was also inside my wish list companies. But on the other side, it was also kind of dilemmatic, since the offer from Smartfren will expire after three days, which was going to be on Monday too. It means that I can’t make Smartfren my backup plan in case tiket.com didn’t interested to work with me.

I was really afraid if this case happened: I reject the offer from Smartfren to continue the recruitment stages at tiket.com, but on the other hand, tiket.com reject me as well, and I ended up working nowhere. Oh God please help your weak servant.

Perhaps some of you are asking why I would prefer tiket.com over Smartfren. Both of them are considered as a “giant”, right? Why bother being confused if both choices are good?

It is true that whatever the decision I made, whether it was tiket.com or Smartfren, they are all great. But there is something I can’t explain well. For those who are studying Computer Science in colleges, they would understand that tech companies, like tiket.com, Bukalapak, Tokopedia, Gojek, Traveloka, or even the FAANG, are more preferable than the others, and that is exactly what I think.

Saturday, 24 July 2021

There is not much to tell about this day. I did another interview (which means my second job interview) for an internship at Glints Academy. There is also an interesting story about Glints Academy, and I am going to make one about this. So, keep up with our stories, if you are interested! :)

I’ve mentioned this a bit in my previous story, go have a read here.

Monday, 26 July 2021

This is the big day. I spent some hours researching tiket.com, like their visions and missions, and anything related to the company. I hope that it would help me if there will be questions like “What is your motivation in joining us” or anything similar. Let’s move forward to the interview.

I was interviewed by 3 persons, they were Pak Felix, Pak Rolies, and Pak Arief. What I say about the interview is that it was really technical rather than behavioral. So my research earlier on the day was pretty much useless since they didn’t ask me a single question related to things like that.

First, Pak Rolies asked me about some mathematics competitions that I put in my curriculum vitae, and asked if I’m interested in Competitive Programming (or CP, which heavily correlate with one’s ability and passion in maths). I said that I love doing CP for the last two months, At first, I was doing CP just to prepare for interviews and technical assessments, but later it became an addiction. He was impressed with that since scoring 72 on the coding test was quite good for those who were just practicing for two months.

Next, I was asked about a mistake I made in the coding test. A foolish mistake actually, it happened because I was in a hurry, (in case you forget about this, it was because I have an interview with Smartfren) and I didn’t check my codes. But I explained that mistake very well because I know exactly what my mistake is.

Next, I was asked about some projects I put in my CV. It was about the Data Structure course final assignment, where I implement some data structures like queues, stacks, arrays, graphs, and linked lists to build a CLI-based game. Luckily, one of my seniors once told me that the tiket.com interview involves questions about projects so reviewing those projects is a good idea, and I followed his advice. Alhamdulillah, this part also went great since I can explain things simply, most of them.

After that was the “real one”. A whiteboard coding test with Pak Felix. This one was really hard for me since my head was filled with chaos and panic even though the given problem was an easy level CP. I never do tests like this before, and doing coding on the whiteboard was a lot different from doing it on our beloved text editors. I am pretty sure that this is understandable. :)

Finally, I can solve the problem, but it was after a long process, which includes misunderstood problems, feeling of being stuck, poorly written codes, which made me feel really bad. This part of the interview made me uncertain that I will be accepted to have an internship here, while all the previous parts were great.

After all, Pak Rolies asked me if I had some questions. I asked one thing, “Are there any feedback for my interview? Since I’m not experienced in this, your feedback will be a valuable thing.”

They gave me a lot of advice, which was great and insightful, which made me think that I would not regret it (participating in tiket.com’s recruitment stages) even if I was rejected since I’ve got a lot of good things. In short, they advised me not to rush things, it is good to be fast, but it is better to be true. And that’s all about the interview.

That time, I only hoped that they would announce the result fast.

Around an hour later…

I received this message,

Hi Mirza, thank you for following the recruitment stages for a Software Engineer Intern (Tech Payment Team) at tiket.com. I would like to inform that you are accepted to be one of our interns at this program, congrats!

This is how Allah answer my prayer. He made it easy for me by making tiket.com do such a quick announcement, which was even before Monday ends. I was extremely excited because being an intern at companies like tiket.com is one of my college dreams. That night, I also sign the offer letter.

That’s all, it has been long enough, right? I will tell you more stories, just wait!

Fun fact

While in the interview, I wasn’t aware of who Pak Felix was, but I was curious about him and the other interviewer, and I tried to find them on LinkedIn. And I found out that Pak Felix Jingga is the current head coach of the Indonesian team for the International Olympiad on Informatics. I was surprised, and I hope I can learn a lot from him (and surely the other mentors too) while doing my intern here.