Engineer Review
at Holiday Extras
Placement (10 Months+)
Software Engineering
Hythe
Review Submitted: June 2024
Overall Rating
1.9 /5
The Overall Rating is the average of all the ratings given in each category. We take those individual ratings and combine them into one final score!
2/5
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Overview of Role
2.5/5
-
Skills Development
2.5/5
-
Support and Guidance
1.5/5
-
Company Culture
1.5/5
-
Overall Experience
1/5
-
Future Career Prospects
Overview of Role
Please give an overview of your role and what this involves on a day-to-day basis.
I worked on a variety of projects aimed to enhance the booking experience for users. This includes redesigning, building new features and maintaining existing functionalities. There’s a daily standup to update your progress to the team and after that you work independently to deliver tasks assigned to you. Occasionally we pair program with other engineers to solve issues.
Were you given much responsibility during your placement / internship?
You’re pretty much thrown into the deep end and have to learn to work independently to complete tasks. You’re responsible for the tasks you’re assigned to and if you’re struggling you can reach out to other engineers for help.
Please rate how meaningful the work you were doing was
2/5
Skills Development
Have you learnt any new skills, or developed your existing skills?
Mostly JavaScript and typescript, learnt how to use design library, write unit tests and other supported techs like figma and git
How would you rate the training provided during your experience?
1/5
How would you rate your development of industry-specific skills during the experience?
3/5
How would you rate your development of personal / soft skills during the experience?
3/5
Please rate how these skills have helped you in your career development
3/5
Support and Guidance
How much support and guidance did you receive during your placement / internship?
There’s no consistent mentorship or guidance in place. You’re given a buddy but they may be a backend engineer who’s not familiar with frontend tasks so they can’t help you much. After a few weeks, you fly independently from your buddy and it’s up to you to seek support from other engineers whenever needed. The delivery manager isnt very helpful as they’re not developers and most of the time they don’t know the project requirements yet when you go to the project manager for clarifications they ask you to go to the delivery manager.
How would you rate the support and guidance from your line manager?
2/5
How would you rate the support and guidance from the wider team?
3/5
Company Culture
What was the company culture and general atmosphere like?
They portray themselves as family-like and close-knit but most of them form their own groups and stick together. They often have events to bring everyone together and also have project lounge to encourage creativity outside of regular dev work
How would you rate the inclusiveness of the culture?
1/5
How would you rate the social opportunities?
3/5
How would you rate the diversity initiatives?
1/5
How would you rate the charity, sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives?
1/5
Overall Experience
To what extent did you enjoy your placement / internship?
You have the opportunity to contribute to their dev deliveries but the support from managers is abysmal. There is no plan from the delivery manager to help new joiners get started in their role, especially for placement students where this is likely their first role in tech. Upon joining, there was no ticket suitable for new joiner to work on, nor was there any plan to pair the new joiner with a senior to learn and familiarize with the work. When you’re stuck, you can reach out to other engineers for help but most of the time you’re bounced everywhere with no helpful solution. Communication is terrible as you’re often not included in meetings and yet given the task to complete so you have to do it with little understanding of its purpose because the manager doesn’t have time to explain it.
Please rate your level of enjoyment on your placement / internship
1/5
Please rate how your experience met your expectations
2/5
Future Career Prospects
Please rate the future employment prospects at Holiday Extras
1/5
Recommendations & Advice
Would you recommend Holiday Extras to a friend?
No
What advice would you give to others applying to Holiday Extras
Speak with former or current employees to learn more about the work environment instead of basing it completely from the people you interviewed with. Ensure that the environment meets your expectations before applying. Some teams take better care of their placement students but some have absolutely no idea how to do so. You won’t get to pick the team to join and despite them saying there are opportunities to rotate to other teams, it never happens. It’ll only happen if they’re restructuring and need to move you across other team.
