Undergraduate Placement Software Engineer Review

I enjoyed it quite a lot, I was bored at times, but that's a given at almost any job. Most of the time the work was challenging and really exciting.

I think my contribution was very much appreciated they always treated me equally and with respect.

Whenever I had a question or a problem my manager and team leads always did their best to help.

This really varied depending on what project I was working on. The workflow varied from periods of self-regulated activity (eg how busy did I need to be to complete the work assigned to me) to a whole list of jobs absolutely needing to be done to having nothing to do and waiting for some work to become available.

I was given a lot of responsibility throughout the process from design all the way to test. I was told that this feature needed to be made and I was heavily involved with the design and then given responsibility for large sections of the code.

I didn't receive that much training that I think will help me out in future, the opportunity was there but I didn't take it. If I had the chance to do it again it's something I would focus more on. The coding and design skills I've learned will help me throughout my future career.

Quiet office with nice people, very friendly. Not much social stuff going on outside of the office but I wasn't particularly looking for that.

The handling of the transition from recruitment to employment was really poor and when I started there wasn't anything for me to really do for a couple of weeks.

The company offered plenty of training and training time as part of a personal development plan and the company paid for me to go on a week long course.

Lots of opportunities in engineering available with plenty of projects over an enormously diverse set of fields. You can get to work on some extremely cool stuff while you're there and there's plenty of flexibility to move in and around the company.

I was the only placement student and the rest of the office staff were quite a bit older but they were friendly and inviting. A couple of events happened outside work while I was on placement, which were good fun.

Cost of living was relatively low, socialising usually involved quite a bit of travelling and wasn't something I particularly cared about so I didn't do all that much of that.

Non-existent with only one decent pub in the area, Edinburgh was only half an hour by train though and that was spectacular.

Couple of sporting things that I participated in with colleagues outside of work which were great. Not much besides that.