AGILE Developer Review

The particular teams I was attached to made the work very enjoyable. The AGILE nature of my team made it incredibly empowered to make its own decisions, and everyone did their best to ensure that the work we did was understood by everyone and that it involved innovatory methods. Everyone at my site (Swindon) was both professional and pleasant and the atmosphere felt relaxed. While I enjoyed working for GBS, some of the events were of questionable value or enjoyment. The weekly 'mandatory' lunch and learns were not always the most interesting, while events like Careers Fairs felt more like an advertisement for IBM instead of an actually informative session.

My colleagues created an excellent atmosphere in the workforce. I felt like my opinion was valued at every team meeting, getting a voice early on in my placement. Outside of my team few people knew I was an intern, and I was quickly given a lot of responsibility and truly treated like a professional.

This question is difficult to answer as due to the nature of my team, managers gave the team enormous autonomy and when it came to the work we did what we believed to be best, with minimum interference, Outside of work I received huge amounts of career and general guidance from my managers in Swindon.

A lot of times I would feel under utilized but that had less to do with IBM and more to do with unstable networks or infrastructure making my work impossible.

While initially I had very little responsibility, that quickly changed around January due to team changes. I was given a chance to interact with the client and to effectively lead a small workstream by the end of my placement, tutoring some people who wanted to get contribute to the work I performed but did not have the experience. My team also gave me a lot of responsibility, trust and freedom.

While my core technical skills did not improve greatly due to the nature of my role, my personal skills improved a great deal.

Very relaxed.

While my role became immediately clear once I got to my location, I was initially given a completely different work location, with my actual town of work being roughly 50 miles away. I was only given my true managers name and my true work location during the second day of my induction, a mere two days before the placement started. This is hard to grade, as my Business Unit organised my internship very well but the Foundation side was lacking.

There was a lot of training and a lot of opportunities, sadly some of them a bit out of the way. In general I would say the opportunity to get training is always there, it's just up to the interns to grasp it.

I would recommend people apply to IBM for a placement, as it really is a fantastic opportunity. I would also however advise them to make sure they know where exactly they will be heading and that their offer is exactly as stated in the interview.