Security engineer Review

The placement gave me a lot of opportunities to work with many different systems and to work on a variety of teams from sys admin to testing to database engineering. While the people at times could be a bit of a downside due to the atmosphere and culture that has been created over the years, I would say that overall, the work was good, interesting and engaging and gave me many skills to bring over to other jobs.

My input was asked for and taken on board with a number of projects and my suggestions for software to push out were also accepted on occasion. I felt like my opinion mostly mattered and colleagues would ask for my input and help on a variety of tasks where they felt I would be of value or use to the project.

My manager was not the easiest of people to get along with but he helped where he could and gave me avenues of work to look down when I had issues. Colleagues around me were very hit and miss with help and guidance but it really depended on the day and the mood of those around me. My manager also helped me to devise final year project proposals and ideas.

At the start of the year I was relatively busy getting up to speed with the projects I was going to be on and meekness many people from different teams. However as the year went on and ptoencts became a "maintain" priority my day to day work slipped to almost none. The most I would have was a daily 10 minutes call and answering a few emails but nothing of much substance.

I was put as the main system administrator for the endpoint protection software as well as being the lead tester and analyser for a testing project. I was also asked to be involved in a number of investigations of misconduct and overall I feel I was given a pretty decent amount of responsibility. I was responsible for rollouts of software to hundreds of servers at any one time with little to no supervising behind me.

The only skills I really took from that job onwards were the personable ones and how interactions within a workplace can go. I learned a lot about how managers and higher ups work within large companies and the ways in which people think and act towards those below them. I took little to no technical skills away from that year as everything that I learned was very specific to the systems and processes within BAE.

Depended on the day! It varied from moody and mildly hostile to very fun and engaging. Birthdays were always well met with enthusiasm and good praise and special events such as Halloween and Christmas meant decorating the office. However of people were in a bad mood or if there was stress or strain, the whole office felt it resonate around everyone.

Decent enough. I had a single project which I ran with for the whole year from inception to maintenence so I was able to see all stages of the development life cycle which was good! However other than that one project nothing else was really planned it seemed and there were days and weeks where I would have nothing to do and nothing was avaliable for me to do due to hold ups on the project or simply from running out of tasks to complete.

Very little. It felt very much like for them to invest in me I was required to sign on a 2 year binding contract. While there were talks of courses and certifications while I was on placement, nothing ever came of these as either the organisation of these events was very poor or these were simply attempts to make me want to stick around.

The organisation itself is great to have on your CV and if I could get into the right area of the business I think it would be an interesting point to plan a career from. However, the practices and people make it a less appeasing thought as working day in and day out with the people that I had to became mind numbing and demoralising after a while. If the work and people were right then it would be a higher consideration.