Software Engineer Review

The work was engaging and interesting; every day I wanted to go into work to tackle the challenges of the day. I worked with a range of technologies, many of which I'd never used before, and was given the necessary training to use them effectively. My time at Metaswitch also involved plenty of morale activities and internal competitions, giving a unique twist to a standard software engineering internship.

Colleagues would often ask me about work that I was doing, and were interested to know how they could use my projects to help their own work. This gave me a real sense that my contributions were valued by everyone around me, and that was I was doing wouldn't just be forgotten as soon as I'd left.

My manager was always available for a chat about almost anything, which was very reassuring, especially during my first few weeks when I wasn't familiar with any of the work that I'd been tasked to do. However, there was a strong ethos that I should be the one to do the work, and while my manager was there to discuss design, he (rightly) did not do any work for me, rather guiding me to a better understanding of the problem at hand.

I was never out of work; there were some times when I thought I maybe had too much work at one time, but this was due to having multiple small projects on the go, and being blocked (waiting for reviews or someone to get back to me) on most of them, so in reality I was never too busy.

I feel I had an above-average level of responsibility, but not one that placed me in too much risk of causing damage should I miss a deadline or break some software. It was nice to have several projects that I was entirely responsible for, however, especially when colleagues then wanted to know how they could use these projects for their own use.

I gained a lot of knowledge in Python and C, and also in networking protocols, which will be skills I can rely on for life, however a lot of the work I've been doing has been specific to telecommunications networks and Metaswitch products in particular, which will be very useful for any future work in telco but otherwise won't be.

I entered the office during a period where we were trying to push out a release, so there was an understandable level of tension, but there was still time for socialising and fun. Amongst my team we had a small hackathon-like event on one day where we just played around with interesting technology. The general atmosphere was laid-back, although we were all conscious that there was work to do.

There were some rough edges when setting up my internship, in particular in the interactions with HR that left me not quite knowing what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go, but these were only minor and quickly resolved themselves. The provided company house wasn't in the best condition either. Everything else was seamless though.

I was given a training and development plan, which I worked through during my time at Metaswitch, and gave me the necessary skills and knowledge to work effectively with their products. My manager also had some one-on-one meetings with me to explain concepts and technologies in use at work, which were very useful and gave me the in-depth understanding I needed. Overall, a lot of time was spent in my development by the company.

I would be very interested to work at Metaswitch in the future - it is a very fun place to work, everyone is devoted to their projects, and the people are fun and sociable. The variety of perks also make it a very fun place to work. Metaswitch are almost constantly hiring software engineers to grow the business, and I feel the company is developing into a market leader. The range of technologies they use are current and modern, making it very exciting to learn new stuff here.

There was a fairly good social scene, helped by the fact that we were all in company houses so interacted with each other on a daily basis outside of work as well as in work.

On the outskirts of London, housing is still relatively expensive, however the company provided a company house for all interns at very low rates of rent. The cost of socialising was the same as anywhere really, certainly within the range I was willing to pay.

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During the summer, there was always something on, be it a competition with my colleagues, pub nights, hackathons or sports events. I only participated in a fraction of the available activities, but even so it was really fun and made me feel as though I was part of the team at the company.