Every day I went on LinkedIn and applied to as many jobs as possible. Most of them never even looked at my resume. Those who did, rejected me because they were megacorporations that wanted experience. I was just a teenager in high school and had nothing to show except my coding projects. I mostly applied to Web Developer jobs and some Blockchain Intern jobs. I was excited to work on Blockchain, but I didn't think they would hire someone without experience; I still applied. After getting rejected from tens of internship positions, a newly founded freelancing company was hiring en masse and called me for an interview for the position of Blockchain Intern.
I immediately got anxious; I set up my camera, cleaned up my room, and added the blur effect on all video-chat apps. But I didn't need to do all that; it was only a voice call. The interview was more of a quiz about general blockchain knowledge. Because I had spent months mining, trading, and investing in cryptocurrencies, I nailed it. I got most of the questions right and felt confident about myself. The next day, I got a call that I was accepted. The salary was low, only 2000 rupees (~25 dollars) per month for 20 hours per week. The only reason to accept the offer was to acquire experience and learn about blockchain tech. Being desperate, I said yes.
There was no onboarding; they just sent me a link to a Slack group and told me to join, which I did. They welcomed me in the general chat, assigned me a project, and told me to download and sign in to some other apps. One was ScreenshotMonitor, which I installed but didn't use because of privacy concerns; it monitored the employee by taking random screenshots when it was on. The other app was ClickUp, a productivity app in which they assigned tasks on a board. After doing all this, I realized they hadn't sent me an official offer letter, so I asked HR for that. They said they'd send it in a few days. I thought that was fine, but my sister said, "Don't work unless they send you the offer letter, because then you'd work for free when you were supposed to get paid." When I told them I needed the letter to start working, they sent it the next day.
The experience so far was underwhelming, to say the least: lack of communication, no meetings, ambiguous messages, and everything felt a bit off. But I shrugged it off and just continued; it turned out fine in the end.