Software Engineer Placement Review

As a software engineering intern, you will be assigned to a team and given a project within this team. Work may involve:
- Collaborating with your team and mentor to scope out your project and discuss how to best approach the different parts needed
- Day to day may involve writing code, debugging, researching, system design etc.
- Attend daily standup meetings and other meetings where you will discuss your progress and plan out what you intend to do for the day.

Yes, interns and placement students are given a lot of autonomy over the project and are able to scope out their work, as well as taking full responsibility for it. Alongside this, mentors and managers are willing to help to provide resources for areas you may not be so familiar with, as well as provide support to design and debug these systems.
Design decisions are entirely given to the intern, and interns are able to talk to other teams and even cross collaborate with other teams if they deem it useful.

My project was mainly surrounding web technologies; this included:
- React - building an intuitive frontend for my application
- Node.js - a supporting backend
- Python - a supporting service that interacts with my web application.
Key developments included:
- Writing clean, maintainable code
- Being able to design a large system
- Communication skills, both inter and intra team to showcase your project and communicate ideas and blockers clearly
- Dealing with large, complex systems (understanding them, understanding the data I need to use from it, understanding where my project fits in with this)

My team were always willing to provide support to me for even the most basic of questions (although it is recommended that you at least attempt something before asking for help!). They are willing to take time out of their busy schedule to hold meetings to help you understand the complex systems of your team, and learn best practices of software engineering (such as testing, maintainable code etc.). Furthermore, outside of your team, there are "guilds" and other internal public chat groups and forums where you can ask more specific questions to people with more expertise (such as python specific questions, C++ specific questions, distributed systems, etc.)

Company culture is very supportive, and there is always help available for you. Scheduling calls with engineers of any seniority was also very easy and generally everyone was very excited to share what they are working with. Company hierarchy is flat - there are minimal different titles, and as an intern, your opinion is taking into account and validated with the same weight as any senior engineer. Managers are also very supportive of any external troubles you have outside of work as well.

The placement project given to me has huge impact and you can really see how it will make a large difference to the company even only being here for 6 months. Understanding the distributed system architecture of my team and how it fits in the rest of Bloomberg was also very interesting.
There have also been many intern events, giving us the opportunity to network with other interns and try new things such as painting classes, minigolf, and theatre trips to name a few.

Yes