How I get into Dell Technologies?
Your first job might be one 'Yes' away. During my final year, I signed up for Hack2Hire, expecting a standard competition. Instead, I got a lesson in resilience. Our team of six dwindled down to three after our teammates disappeared.
We could have quit, but we chose to compete against 100 people anyway. We built a full-stack solution using Next.js and Supabase in a single day. Taking 3rd place was great, but the real prize was being one of the 11 people selected for a permanent role at Dell. The lesson? Show up, even when your team doesn't.
What is an ITDP?
ITDP stands for the IT Development Program. It is Dell Technologies premier rotational program designed to transition high-potential fresh graduates into future technical leaders. Remember that we managed to get 3rd place? Well that win brought us here. I'm now part of ITDP at Dell. I'm taking you along what life is like being an ITDP in Dell Technologies.
What makes ITDP special from a regular Software Engineer role is the focus on leadership. Another most unique part of an ITDP is that you aren't stuck in one team but you got 3 times of rotation program to other departments within Dell IT org. It is your chance to jump around and explore the teams and managers. Example, your first year will be a Full-Stack Dev and your second rotation as a Dev Ops Engineer. While 3rd rotation will be your last rotation and this will be the last team you're in and it is permanent. This helps you find your true fit.
Global Networking
ITDP is a global corhort with members in Malaysia, India, Ireland and the US. You get to collaborate with people across the world. This is likely why the selection process is so competitive and challenging.
SRE - Site Reliability Engineer
Now, for the core of my role. I'm an SRE - Site Reliability Engineer - and my focus is our Salesforce platform. I'm looking at our dashboards, not just looking for bugs but more like into latency, traffic spikes and system health. We use tools like Splunk, Catchpoint and Grafana to catch issues before the users even notice them.
Wrap-up
But there's one more update I have to share. Since starting this journey as a fresh grad in the ITDP, I've officialy been promoted to Software Engineer II. For me, this promotion is more than just a little change. It's a shift in responsibility.
I want to take a moment to appreciate the people who helped me navigate the transition from a student to a professional. I didn't get here alone.
First, to my manager, Joanna Ooi - thank you for the mentorship and for giving me the space to take risks and grow. Your trust in my ability to handle the Salesforce SRE scope is a huge reason I've reached this milestone.
And to my teammates - Marina, Sagar, Raghava, Chaitanya, Jen, Kush, Nghia, Jyothi, Angela, Rozy and Annei. Thank you for the late night debugging sessions, the 'blameless' post mortems, and for always willing to share your your expertise. I'm lucky to be part of the best team ever.
I'm rotating soon to a new team and this is my last as an ITDP. I'm graduating soon and it is a new journey!
Thanks for watching my journey, and I'll see you in the next share.