I was invited to participate in T-Mobile's annual Bellevue Magenta Match event, which is basically a career fair for a selected group of people. They invited around 50-60 people, yet only had 20-25 intern positions (1 position per team). Think of the event as speed dating. There was only about 5 or 6 rounds, so people had to quickly make a choice regarding the teams that they would talk to. Each table had a sign that listed the positions that they were looking to fill (business, front-end, back-end, UX/UI) , which made it a bit easier to pick. Yet you still don't get to all the teams that you would like to. You typically get 15 minutes to talk to a manager or two per round. There is no time for behavioral questions so they tell you what they do as a team and you talk about your qualifications (typical career fair stuff).
I came in hoping to find a team that was in need of a UX Designer for the summer. Yet even though some managers had indicated they need UX Designers, in reality, what they are looking for are developers. Unless you have solid coding skills, it will be difficult to get hired. The hiring managers know close to nothing when it comes to UX principles and terminology and some are extremely dismissive of the field altogether. For example, one of the managers that I talked to mentioned that if I got hired, I would be working on customer-facing software because users do not use corporate software and thus you don't need a UX Designer to build it.
For the record, the word "user" applies to anyone who uses something (in this case, software). This is UX 101. Oftentimes (although not always) customer, the person who make a decision to purchase a product, and user, the person who uses it, are the same person. So if he was using them interchangeably, that just shows how little managers at T-Mobile actually care about their workers. Attitudes like that is what makes corporate software suck and incredibly unintuitive to use. I understand that they are trying to cut cost but this goes against everything the management preaches. Managers at T-Mobile constantly talk about how they care about their employees. Well if they actually did, they would have a different attitude when it came to building company software.
If you are a UX Designer, be cautious of what you are getting yourself into.