Software Development Intern Review

I really enjoyed it! The office is wonderful, clean, modern and colourful. The breakfasts are delicious and the snacks are a good accompaniment for lunch. The other employees are really open and helpful. The work I was given was meaningful and, though my team was always available to support me, I was given a large amount of autonomy in completing tasks.

I felt highly valued by colleagues when it came to direct discussion and feedback sessions with my manager. I also always felt I was treated well and as a full employee as opposed to an intern. However, my team consisted mostly of senior developers, so there was an expectation that we all developed our work independently, and there wasn't a culture of celebrating accomplishments. As a result I didn't always feel much encouragement.

I was given a lot of support and guidance when it came to completing technical tasks and in response to direct questioning or meetings requested on my part. My managers were supportive of my technical development but were relatively hands off when it came to personal and professional development.

I was normally appropriately busy as I was given a main project to focus on and was at leisure to pick up other side tasks as they came up. There were some transition periods when my manager changed or there were changes in the company and I had less work to do. There's no real way around that however and changes were not constant. I also never felt that I was overworked.

I was given a very high level of responsibility. My projects were real projects that the team already had in the pipeline, and I was not checked in on much more than any other members of the team. I was able to actually release to the live servers and was even responsible for finding and fixing some live bugs that I then hotfixed.

I managed to develop some very helpful techniques for improving programming productivity in an environment where other teams and staff are working and I can potentially be interrupted by requests for help or work-related messages. I also gained skills in managing a large number of tasks of differing sizes and time constraints. These skill will be useful in my final year as well as in future roles. I also got a lot better at communicating between teams, and I gained experience in multiple areas of software development (library and API design, backend development, frontend development using multiple technologies).

The atmosphere in the office is positive. There is often stimulating or entertaining conversation going on in the office, corridors and snack areas. A lot of people really seem committed to their work and want to be here. The offices themselves are colourful, bright and filled with plant life (seemingly non-hayfever inducing plants). There's also a decent amount of natural light. Also booze and games on Fridays and quite a lot of cinema/tourist/going out opportunities! The downside of being fully open plan is that sometimes it's quite noisy. A lot people keep a pair of headphones around for when they need to do fully focused and solitary work.

The placement wasn't particularly structured or well organised. My manager had ideas for projects and tasks for me to take on, but that defined most of the structure. I didn't have many check ins and I didn't have clear expectations set out for me beyond completion of technical tasks (like what level of competency/independence I should have and what professional development goals should I set). This never felt like a problem, as it came somewhat as a result of being given a lot of independence. However, it might have been nice to have more check ins and onboarding events at the beginning.

I received some workshops on working in and understanding teams as well as presentation training mid-internship. I also had the opportunity to exercise some of that training in a presentation I delivered to other interns at the end of my internship. Other than this I was not pushed to develop personally or professionally. The company has in internal training platform, but it was hard to know where to start with it and I was never mandated to use it.

The company generally seems very intent on hiring from its pool of interns. I had a previous shorter internship with them, and am currently on a longer internship as part of my degree requirements. Last time, they really wanted me to come back, but settled on having me for a second internship as I had two more years of university. I still have 1 more year of university, so they aren't able to offer me a contract now as they don't know what specific roles will be available at that time, but they're planning on giving me a letter of intent, which I'm very happy about.

There was a good social scene amongst fellow placement students. There were events that brought all the students worldwide together, and this was good for forming friendships. The free booze on Fridays, the games consoles and the game/party nights were a good place to further develop these friendships. I didn't develop particularly strong relationships within my team. However, my team is quite small and just happened to have relatively low camaraderie. Other teams did not have this problem.

The cost of living in London is high. However, the transport links to King are very good so I did not need to live close to it (which would have been prohibitively expensive). The food and drink places nearby are quite expensive but again not prohibitively. There were a decent amount of paid for company events so these helped.

I believe the night life in Soho is quite good but I never took full advantage of it so can't really comment.

There were a lot of opportunities to do this. There's the yearly Kingfomarket where all staff from across offices are flown to a country (Spain, Barcelona this year) for partying, information sharing and socialising. There are also weekly football matches and gym sessions, as well as videogames/boardgames/physical games to play in the Kitchen area after work.