Industrial Placement Software Engineer Review

Throughout the year I found that none of my tasks bored me. Each task was challenging and was drawing upon knowledge I had gained at university as well as requiring me to learn new things. The office was very laid back and you are not screamed at to do anything, which I think helps productivity.

I feels the rest of my team as well as the management hierarchy gave me as much respect as they give a each other. The encouraged me to voice my concerns and opinions about various things. Some of the tools I developed are actually used by the employes of ARM today so that shows they have the faith in what I had created.

I think I received the perfect amount of guidance from my team. I was given guidance, especially when setting up my environment with the ARM tools and retrieving code to develop. However, what I thought was very good was that I was encouraged to be independent and work on tasks myself and research things if I had a problem, but if I queried a team member about something they would never hesitate in helping.

I was always busy, in that I had work to be getting on with. This is down to personal preference but I prefer to always have something to do rather than sit there twiddling my thumbs! I was regularly asked by my management about my workload to make sure it wasn't too much or too little.

I feel the responsibility I was given was the perfect amount. I wasn't running the show but I was given access (read/write) to source code repositories which shows they had trust in me not to remove everything. Whilst a colleague was a away for a month, I was in charge of the web applications used by the employees; any problems/requests would come my way and I would deal with them.

The skills I gained are invaluable. Not only did I gain new skills, but I developed skills I already had. I developed my confidence and presentation skills by giving monthly end of sprint demos with the team. Time management was a big part of the placement, to get tasks ready for a certain date, especially when it came to the end of sprint demos.

The atmosphere was fantastic, there were plenty of football fans there, which is all I needed really to get me through! In all seriousness though, you are not discouraged to have fun, as long as you are working as well it's not a problem. There is also a pool tabel there.

It was great, I had tasks ready when I got into the office to help me get to grips with the infrastructure at ARM and to refresh my programming skills. Planning for the whole team took place at the beginning of each month - I was considered to be part of the team so I often forgot that it was only a placement.

As I wasn't a full time employee I was not given the opportunity to go on training courses and things like that. But I feel the time invested in guiding me was more than enough for what I was given to do.

I would love to work at ARM again, my manager does not have the bandwidth to take on a full time employee at the moment but you never know....

There aren't many placement students at ARM so it is difficult but the people you work with are nice enough and welcoming enough for you to want to socialise with them.

It was generally quite pricy, but then it is Cambridge. I was commuting from London so I didn't really get to experience the prices of nights out but pub lunches weren't too expensive.

I wouldn't really know, I was commuting from London so I didn't really get the chance to experience it. But the area doesn't look short of places to go and relax.

Yes, there are squash clubs, gaming clubs and there is a gym at work. Football happens weekly and there are probably many things I never came across -it's a big complex!