Software Engineer Review

My role was a software engineer working in tax technology. I wrote microservice-based applications to calculate tax rates and reportability. I primarily worked in Java with the use of the Spring framework and functional programming concepts such as Java streams, optionals and vavr.
I also did some programming in Angular with Cypress used as a testing framework. Around once per week we had requirements discussions with our stakeholders and translated those into stories that we completed on an agile basis.

From the beginning of my internship I believe I have been given full responsibility of the code I write and I was integrated immediately with the wider team, working on the same projects as them. I am able to pick up any user story from the backlog of work we have and produce a solution. I am able to critique code from other people in the team in PRs, and I have been encouraged to make my opinions heard in requirements discussions.

The main skills improvements I have made have been in my programming. I am now able to use many functional programming techniques to my advantage to write cleaner code. I am able to start writing applications from the ground up with a test-driven approach, and also take into account behaviour-driven testing from cucumber tests written alongside our users.
As far as the business aspect, I am now able to confidently hold meetings with stakeholders to gather requirements and present the outcomes produced.

I received a lot of wide-ranging support during my internship. We engaged in pair programming for each and every story so I was always able to learn and ask questions if there were any parts of the code I didn't understand.
From the beginning, I have been able to set up meetings with anyone from my team or even many members of other teams within the organisation to ask any questions I have about the functions within the organisation.

The company culture is quite good on the whole. I have a very good team of intelligent people who are always willing to help out. I was strongly encouraged throughout to ask as many questions as I felt necessary to improve my understanding and have never felt that I have asked a question that was received particularly poorly.
However, at least in my team it seemed that many people work late and I was witness to a few comments from colleagues about other colleagues leaving at 5 o'clock on the dot.

I think that my placement has been by far the most useful part of my degree and I have learnt far more about my chosen career than I ever did at university.
My team has been fantastic to work with and I have felt comfortable around them since the very beginning and I feel I have grown fairly close with certain members of the team.
This has been one of the greatest opportunities I have had for a number of reasons, and I am very glad that I've done it.

Yes