Junior Engineer Review

Sony is a wonderful company and I greatly enjoyed being apart of the Sony family. My department dealt alot with televsions and I can honestly say I have much more knowldge about televisions then when I started. I dealt with software aspects but something I really enjoyed learning which was not in direct relation to what I did was learning about picture quality and how every pixel is created to make the picture quality brilliant. I learnt alot and overall enjoyed the experience.

Every team is defferent and I worked with a team of other Placement students and other Sony staff, where we were resposible for software related task(my team was a sub team of a bigger team). I felt valued but I also felt overlooked in favour for my male counterparts, which occaitionally happened.

My manager and I interacted on an appropriate level, but it lacked effective communication; support was given when I asked or I would find someone in the company who has experience in what ever area I was having trouble with to advise on what possible paths I could take to solve my problem. People are generally willing to help especially if you are interested in what ever area they do at the company. What you have to realise is that, you are treated as an employee and not a student so you are not given everything but expected to figure some aspects out on your own, but don't be afraid to ask for assistance, just don't be dependant on someone telling you everything.

My team is mostly busy, sometimes we have more urgent deadlines which would take priority and put something else at the back of the queue. Task change based on what is needed more urgently by the company. Sometimes I had days where my days were light, other days every second was scheduled for specific task in order to meet dealines. Some projects have deadlines, some don't it depends on what ever I was working on at any time.

I was given a good level of responsibility, unforntunately during my time at the company I have not had any project which has been under my sole control which have actually gone into final stages. I have collaberated on a large portion of projects and been in charge of a project which was later put on hold. The thing with working for such a large company is that you can start one thing and it never gets finished until years later by someone else.

I have gained alot of skills. I now know how to code Android, Java Script, PHP and worked with very costly hardware :) which is an improvement from coming in with a largely Java coding focus. I have developed my communicaion skills a bit, and received training about various sectors of the company(what they do and how they do it). I have learnt about a wider range of things which can be done through coding and because of this I am now more open to going more in depth in coding for final of university.

The sony culture at my office is very laid back which is not something I expected and it is something I still have not gotten used to. It is very friendly and open. There are lots to do in the office if you find the right people because sometimes events are not properly advertised so you never hear about it and it may have been something you would have been interested in. However the atmosphere in the office is very open I would say. The basic idea is if you have work to do, you do it, within the appropriate and respectable time frame and respect everyones' job and space, but beyond that it was very not something I expected.

My placement was overall organised well for its intended purpose. I took over projects and started some. I was able to work on various technologies which you learn alot as you do more, about things you like and dislike. At certain times of the year all the placement sudents meet which is a plus because you get to hear about the various parts of the company and how their jobs are done. In general my first 2 weeks felt like an abundance of information is being thrown at me in no structured manner but after a while I understood what I was doing and I got into the same structure that I once felt was swallowing me and unknown to me, I learnt to balance every project, task, event and thing in general that get thrown at me.

At the early stages of my placement the comany did not really have any training for me to part take in, however during the second half of my placement with the commencement of workshops nearly everyweek, I was able to attend workshops where I gained knowledge about software, hardware and general company dynamic.

I appreciate the sector of the company I have worked for, however upon vsiting other sectors of the company I think it would be interesting to try to branch into other areas because Sony is such a large company there are so many Sony companies I did not actually know Sony owned until I started working for them, I am very much happy to work with Sony in the future but I would like to find an area in Sony which better suits me. I love Sony and what they stand for and what they produce( trust me I could confindently convince people to buy sony), So I would like to explore different sectors of Sony family moving forward.

There was an average social experience, I went out with the other placement students in my office on multiple occations for things such as birthday dinners, night outs. Some times you would find you do things in large groups and sometimes you would do things with fewer people. Going out with Sony staff who were not placement students was not something I did often but you can join the football team or sports club and get that level of social experience if you so desire.

My office is about 40 minutes outside of London, so living here is on average about £950-£1200(total) for 2 bed flats(avaerage £470 per person without bills) to rent. Living with other placement students is advised, the other option is to live in shared accommodation and this would cost about £550(bills included in most places). if you decided to live on your owe it wuld cost about £800(with out bills). There are alot of food places, but not alot of places to go out, the greatest plus is that I live near a train station which has trains to alot of places(genrally not that costly) so something I do is jump on a train and go visit random places around England on a weekend.

There is a limited range of night life as I life in a communter town so most times, going out requires a train jounrey but Reading is close by and other cities around so your options sometimes can be as large and as little as you would like then to be.

There is sports society which if you can find someone to sign you up, you would be able to attend events they organise(It is not very known that there is a sports society) and you may have a sport club of some sort at the company. Other than that you can find activites in the community to part take in.