Software Intern Review

I enjoyed it very much. I feel that I was very productive and I learnt a lot, in a company where there is no culture of stress or racing to deadlines or late nights or anything like that. I got on well with my colleagues and I would love to work there again full-time.

I was made to feel part of the team and I took part in planning meetings and fun team activities. I paired with several members of the team and it wasn't just me sitting there while they typed - I felt like I actually contributed.

My manager was very supportive and helped out whenever I needed it (or referred me to somebody else if he was busy).

I usually had enough to be getting on with without ever being made to feel under pressure to hurry up. There were a few days when I did almost nothing while I was between tasks but that was just as much my fault for not taking more initiative in finding something to do.

I wrote code that was deployed to live systems (after a standard pull request review), both independently and pairing with my manager. I was also reviewed a couple of pull requests, which was quite the responsibility as it meant I was the last line of defence before code being merged into master.

I learned an awful lot about being in a team working on a shared codebase and agile development, as well as things like build servers and version control (though I had used VCS before) that aren't really taught in university. I also learnt C# (I had never used it before) as well as many software engineering practices.

The atmosphere is generally relaxed. The company doesn't impose very many restrictions at all on the employees - e.g. there are no blocked websites, you are encouraged to have frequent breaks (our team has a Wii on which I have played many games of Mario Kart) - and in return people seem happy to do good work. One of the company's sayings that they like to repeat is "We'll be reasonable with you, and you'll be reasonable with us." Also there is free hot breakfast and lunch every day.

It seemed very well organised. Every communication I had with HR before the internship was handled quickly and effectively. Interns were assigned to teams not randomly but rather on the basis of how well the intern, team, and manager would fit together.

My manager was very supportive in having to kind of teach me C# the first couple of weeks. In addition there were 'intern code retreats' where we and our managers spent a day doing programming exercises and learning more about refactoring & writing code.

Many employees are former interns so it seems they are very keen on hiring interns full-time.

There were 11 interns throughout the company and the company encouraged us to have fun together - they paid for us interns to go out for dinner/bowling one night. The other interns were very friendly and we all got on well.

Cambridge is quite expensive - not as expensive as London but more expensive than anywhere else outside the South East.

Not really a nightlife person - there are clubs though I've no idea if they're any good.

There are many social clubs (though I didn't take part in any, several of the interns did), including many that do activities outside of work like Ultimate Frisbee, rock climbing, various sports and so on.