Digital Innovation Review

Mostly spent on Excel and Powerpoint, with either regular or minimal meetings. I had half my time be spent on developing Jupyter Notebooks and Python code, however that was only because I personally told my line manager that, that is what interested me.

I have developed my skills in Pandas significantly, as well as some FastAPI usage. I have also learnt a lot more about Excel, how to cater presentations and data to an audience of more senior employees.

I was responsible for a significant suite of tools to be used by the team I left behind, so even though it wasn't a mission critical technology, it will be something that significantly improves on the existing tools they were using.

I received good guidance from the manager I did the coding work for, but not that much from my line manager. This stemmed from the fact that my line manager is not in the field that I am interested in, and assignment of the line manager should be a more considered process, with input from the interns as to what they are interested in.

The company culture and general atmosphere were very nice and welcoming, the facilities at the office were great, however some of the interns seemed to have an interest in gossiping about other in a capacity greater than I would have liked.

I enjoyed it as it was my first experience in the corporate world, but the work that was advertised (more in line with software engineering) was not what I would have been doing had I not spoken up about it immediately, and even then I was not working as part of a larger software engineering team as I would have liked to. I think the role was deeply misadvertised and was more of a managerial/corporate role than a tech role, and it's shown me that there is not much career progression in a tech role at a bank, so I am unlikely to work there in future.

Yes

If you apply here for software engineering, expect to only do it off your own initiative, rather than being assigned to a software development team, barely anyone has that happen. There is not much scope to develop code and learn how to work as part of a team as a lot of the architecture used at HSBC is old and not very useful. If you are unsure what you want to do or you may want to work in something finance related, this role at HSBC is great and exposes you to a small amount of tech, but mainly data analysis in Excel and the roles of various teams at the bank. If you know you want to work in tech, software engineering and development, this is not the place for you and I would treat it as a backup option.