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Senior intern

2021-07-10

The stories of my working life continue. This is my life now.

Anyway, I've been continuing the settle in at this company I'm working in and I'm finding myself in a rather interesting role. I'm kinda starting to think of myself as a sort of a senior intern, which sounds kind of like an oxymoron.

For context, the team I'm working in has a pretty strange configuration to begin with. We are basically a group of 15 interns lead by one manager. This group then sub-divides into multiple teams that are each working on a separate project. Because the projects are R&D in nature and because of the intern-to-manager ratio, we have quite a lot of autonomy and roles and responsibilities are pretty fluid. The teams are primarily self-organizing and self-lead. Our manager only really comes into the picture if there's something a team needs to complete their tasks and during dailies, demos and retrospectives.

This creates a pretty interesting group dynamic, because there isn't that much of a formal hierarchy imposed on us. So, people organically pick up roles and responsibilities as they are needed.

One thing I noticed early on is that many of my peers were at an earlier point in their studies than I was. Many are on their first or second year of their bachelor's studies. People also seem to be working on very different kinds of degrees, which means they've been taught different kinds of things and in different ways. Some of them are very mathematically oriented, and I have real trouble keeping up with them when they start talking data science or graph theory. Jupyter Notebook? What is that?

But what I realized is that I have a pretty wide, although sometimes shallow, understanding on all sorts of things that are relevant to software engineering. Particularly, I have a fair bit of experience with programming, version control systems, Linux and the software development process. And, at the very least, I have some opinions about these things.

So, what I've started doing a fair bit is just helping around and sharing little nuggets of knowledge where it has been relevant. When I heard that code reviews were backlogged I asked the other people to send me their coding challenges to review. At first I kind of just went around offering help when I noticed some people struggling with something that seemed vaguely familiar to me. But now people have actively started coming to me with their problems and tagging me on their coding challenges asking for review. It has also been nice to hear that my reviews have been considered helpful and insightful. Recently I also held a training session about Git workflows that got a lot of praise for both the content and the presentation style.

What I'm discovering is that I like teaching people and helping them out. I'm also quite keen on inspecting, evaluating and improving our processes. The Git workflow training was a product of me noticing that we were struggling with merging code, so I decided to do a little presentation to try and smooth that part of the process out.

So, I'm sort of becoming a knowledge repository and I guess a sort of a mentor to the other members of the group. I'm by no means unique in this sense, we have a couple of other interns in similar roles where other interns are turning to them for guidance. But, I still find it interesting that this is happening to me after working there less than 2 months. I think it's a valuable opportunity though and I'm not sure if I would have been able to grow this much as a developer had I been an intern in a more hierarchical group. If nothing else, at least I'm gaining a fair bit more confidence in myself from all this.