For people here applying to SWE co-ops/internships or new grad roles, how are you actually getting interviews right now?
Are they mostly coming from cold applications, referrals, career fairs, networking, previous internships, recruiters, etc.? And if referrals have helped, how did you actually get them?
what are employers really judging students/new grads on now. I know LeetCode/DSA, behavioral, system design/LLD, and project questions are still common, but what seems to matter most in practice?
Especially with AI coding tools becoming normal, what are employers expecting junior engineers/interns to actually do day to day now?
And for projects, what are interviewers drilling into now since people are using AI coding tools to code most, if not all of the projects ? Architecture, technical choices, tradeoffs, debugging, deployment, what you personally contributed, why you built it a certain way, or something else?
Would really appreciate hearing from anyone who has gone through internship/co-op or new grad recruiting recently.