Developer Review

I thought the placement scheme was great. The people were lovely, the location and the firm were great and they treated placement students like full time employees - you almost forget you have to go back to uni! I felt as though the work I was doing was valued and thoroughly enjoyed my time.

My team were great, it's quite a large team so there were a lot of people to get to know but each person is more than happy to spend time chatting with you and to help out when I needed help. We had a lot of team events outside of work. When helping users of the system with problems/improvements it feels as though they value your contribution.

I was sat next to my manager and he was so welcoming if I asked questions or just wanted to check something through with him. He would also regularly check to see if I was okay and had enough work to do. We didn't have very many formal performance evaluation meetings but generally he would tell me how I was getting on so I don't think they were needed.

The work I was doing was all project based so the workload really fluctuated based on the stages in the project I was at and how many I had. If I felt bored then I would either pick up a small project where users had had an issue and a fix/improvement was required or there is quite a lot of training/personal development opportunities available too.

All of the projects I have worked on were proper projects. I had one 'easing in' project when I first started to get me used to the system I was working on, this was an important project but lower risk. They treated me as a normal employee though so each project will impact the business in some way. I liked this and the fact that I was expected to manage my own time and get on with it.

My job was as a developer so my programming skills have improved hugely which will come in useful for parts of my course. I have also learnt project management, which I had never properly experienced before and time management similarly. The whole year is a training course in soft skills, professional behaviour and networking along with the skills learnt in the role. I think it's great to have experienced this now to go back to after my degree.

The office as a whole had a good atmosphere, everyone was chatty and friendly so it was never deathly silent. I was sat on the trading which was slightly different as you could hear the speakers going with the traders talking to each other and we had a mobile phone ban so things were slightly stricter on my floor.

The placement was organised extremely well organised. We were given plenty of training throughout the whole year, HR were great for if I needed advice or had questions and in general things ran pretty smoothly. After the first few months we are left to work independently so without too many checks from HR but would schedule in catch ups sometimes.

There was plenty of training, some was firm mandatory, some were optional and others were intern specific. There were personal development talks given every 3 weeks or so which were optional but I found interesting. We were also given plural sight licences which we could use for training in our own time. We had many networking sessions and opportunities to get involved with volunteering activities.

From speaking to current grads it seems as though the firm has a good retention rate for placement students. They seem keen to have placement students back but it depends on headcount. During the time here we are encouraged to do a lot of networking and shadow various other teams so if we can't be placed in our team then we have some good other leads.

Every Thursday (excluding the winter) there is an event on the terrace with a subsidised bar which a lot of people attend. HR organised intern 'socials' at the beginning of the placement so everyone becomes friendly from there, generally there's always someone to have lunch/a drink with. We also had a lot of team events outside work.

I found rent surprisingly expensive and the cost of drinks are also high but as expected for central london. But all in all things aren't extortionate and it's easy enough to bring in your own lunches which saves some money too. Quite a few of the work organised events are free so those you don't feel like you have miss out on anything as you can't afford it.

The nightlife was decent, there's a lot of good bars and pubs which we'd often go to. Usually I found that you go out with the people you work with or we'd go out with the other placement students but there's a lot of people to talk to. We had one club near work which we'd often go to.

Yes. We got sent newsletters which would list different activities around London to get involved in and you hear lots of things through word of mouth. There are quite a few different social/sport clubs to join and volunteering is quite highly promoted. I found this year has got me into running a lot more, I was surprised at how healthy people were in general.