Target reviews

My disappointment isn't with the Target internship program, but rather with the company's culture (I should preface my negative remarks by saying that this is purely my intern perspective, and not that of a full time employee). They made no bones about it to the interns: if you don't conform to the culture, you're not coming back after the summer. For all of Target's jazz about diversity, they sure love to label people and pigeon-hole them into categories. NEVER let anyone see you doing anything by yourself, or you'll run the risk of being labeled a 'loner'. If you're a frank and honest person, you'll be labeled as a 'poor communicator' and coached to be more passive aggressive (which is completely backwards if you're not from Minnesota). If you're not constantly setting up networking meetings with random people that have nothing to do with your project, you'll be labeled as 'too independent' and 'non-collaborative.' You won't have enough time for your project to fit it into 40 hours AND do all of the networking stuff - if you mention this, you'll be labeled as having 'poor time management' so you'll have to work from home (unpaid) and hope nobody finds out. Someone who is bubbly and bouncy and spends their time networking all day will fit in better than a laid-back results-oriented analytical person. It may make for a fun headquarters, but how is this productive for such a HQ-dominated retail company? I find Target's corporate culture to be surprisingly inefficient, backwards, and hypocritical. An atmosphere of diversity is not a place where you make a point of ostracizing employees for having differing personalities - who don't fit the 'brand'. I personally have been able to get through the internship pretty well, but I have no intention of taking them up on an offer if there is one.

Since there is nothing much to do, and lots of coffee to drink when not doing it, there's a lot of time on people's hands to create politics at every level. In my team, which is a technical team, they change the leader every quarter on some pretext or the other, much of the time it is clear that the leader in Minneapolis needs some local Lackey and keeps changing their mind on whom. There is no roadmap as much though there are many meetings around it, because there's 5 managers for every engineer or analyst or working employee. These managers keep 1/1s that are recurring , they also keep 3-4 on 1s and then many on many meetings. Every two quarters, they start a re architecture road map, no one knows what's the difference between re-arching ring, refactoring, and just coding. The SVP says things like we are number 1 in selling swimwear, thanks to you all your efforts, to the engineering teams that have no idea why their efforts led to selling swim wear. She started many efforts that failed I hear, so she's been rewarded with running digital which is code for internet commerce. We are all in one happy mess, but there's TT, free food, access to compute, and coffee. So we are here trying to make the best of those.