Software Developer Review

I really enjoyed my internship! I did mine during the 2020 lockdown, so it was a fair bit out of the ordinary, being completely remote. Despite this, I had a good time. The work we did was very enjoyable, and was part of a proper project, which I liked as it meant it really felt like we were doing useful work. There were also a variety of events put on (even remotely), which were a lot of fun.

I felt very valued as part of the intern team I was on. We would all do calls together multiple times a day, and were relying on each other for various parts of the project. I felt everyone respected each other very much. We did a lot of pair work, which definitely helped boost this, as it meant everyone got the chance to properly work with each other. We also heavily tested each others' work, giving feedback accordingly, and acting on any problems that arose. Due to the nature of a remote internship, I think at first it was comparatively harder to form closer connections with the others, but this came with time, and we adapted to it by having dedicated time to chat and get to know each other.

For the most part, all supervisors/full time employees have been really approachable and friendly, making it clear how open they were to questions and chats. Again as the internship was done remotely, it was at first a little more difficult to get feedback for smaller things that would've easily been fixed had we been in person. I think this is something that couldn't really have been changed much though, and again as time went on this was less of an issue.

Day to day activity varied by quite a bit, due to the fact that the work I was doing was always changing (which I really liked!). We would start each day at 9am for a meeting about what had been done on the previous day, have an hour's lunch break, have time set aside for more social activities in the afternoon, and typically I would end the working day from 5-5:30pm, depending on what other breaks I had taken in the day. In between these times I found myself pretty busy, working pretty much solidly.

I feel we were given a lot of responsibility throughout the internship. When working on the full project, we'd be making big changes and make decisions that really did affect the way things would work going forwards. While we always had a manager to talk to, we were treated with a lot of respect and given a lot of independence. We were able to properly add things to the project, and additionally we were also reviewing each other's work, giving each other permission to merge things into the main project.

I think that I've learned a lot of really useful skills during this internship. Some are technical skills, like working with specific languages and tools. The project we were working on utilized a lot of different technologies; we had to pick up a lot of varied skills, as well as how to link them all together. I also learned a lot about how a project is run, and how software development in general works. The inter-personal skills of working in a team will definitely be incredibly useful in pretty much any future job.

This question doesn't exactly apply to my internship, due to it being remote - hard to know what the office is like when you can't be there, sadly. The company did make a lot of effort to put on morale events, however, which were a ton of fun. These ranged from film nights to board games and a game jam. Additionally, there were also regular social call opportunities with regular employees, who were all really welcoming.

The internship was mostly well set up. A lot of emails were sent before the internship had started to fill us in on most of the set up we needed to do and the general idea of what would be happening. As it was remote, I think the first few days could have been better organised - we didn't have too many details before the days had begun, instead finding out what we would be doing on the morning of each day. This I think would've been fine if we had been in the office, but it felt a little strange at home.

I think the company did a great job of training. The first two weeks of my internship were focused on teaching us coding skills, and were completely focused on individual development. After that, even when we were working on the main project, effort was put into making sure the things we were working on would be varied and interesting to keep us learning new skills. Effort was also made to ensure we would have a final result to show off - the work we did had a tangible effect.

The social scene was quite good, even though it was done remotely. Each day we had set time put aside for us to talk to each other, which was very appreciated. Additionally there were also events put on in a fair few evenings such as board games nights and pub quizzes to get people to meet each other, even across different inter teams. I think the social aspect was definitely much reduced by the remote nature, but efforts were put into it.

Yes! The company put on a ton of events to take part in, all of which tended to be very varied in nature. Even though the internship took part through lockdown and physical events were thus limited there were many digital events and games throughout the internship. It seemed there were at least a few events going on each week, all of which were very open. Towards the end of the internship also the company started to put on physical events again, though this was still limited by lockdown by the time I left.