When I first got the callback from jetbrains for an interview I was ecstatic! To work at such an impactful company was a long dream of mine. Here in Germany the job market for IT professionals is very good but it seems like the far majority of companies are some kind of consultancies that dont have any interesting products themselves. Thus I was very excited to finally get a chance to write software that really makes a difference for people! Or so was my dream at least. Of course a junior like me wouldn’t change the world with his beginner level coding skills but I had the chance to learn from the brightest people in the industry and I would say that is also worth something. As it turns out I was able to convince my interviewer and actually got an offer. I just recently finished my first 2 months at the company and think its a good point to recapitulate my experience.
The perks
The first thing that I noticed, and that most people working for such companies probably already take for granted, were the amazing perks. My office in particular offered free lunch, free breakfast twice a week, a massage room with free massages, a company gym with yoga aswell as dance classes.
I was completely blown away by the sheer amount of perks! Just having free snacks and drinks in the kitchen area completely blew me away. It resulted in me visiting the kitchen way too often also partly because I was practicing my cappuccino art using the professional espresso machine.
The environment
Of course all these perks I listed were incredible and I appreciated them a lot, but that was not the reason I wanted to intern at a company like Jetbrains. The real reason was that I wanted to learn as much as possible and work on interesting projects. In this regard I was satisfied, but regardless not everything went perfectly. Although my project was super interesting, my internship started at a bad time for the team and there was not a lot of supervision for me. Regardless I managed to teach myself a lot of the required concepts and actually finished my internship with a project me and my supervisor were satisfied with! My project was to rewrite the backend of the Toolbox-App↗. For this I worked with tools and frameworks like docker↗, kubernetes↗, ktor↗ and kotlinx.serialization↗. I had to write a multithreaded asynchronous microservice and deploy it myself (Wew, thats a lot of buzzwords at once). It was certainly a challenging task, but also very exciting!
Sadly my internship started exactly as a new release of the Toolbox-App was about to be rolled out and the small team barely had time for me. I was in the Munich office with our team lead and still could ask him questions which was good but code reviews and a little more in-depth questions often had to wait.
This turned out fine in the end, as a developer you should be able to solve problems on your own after all.
Sadly after the internship ended, my supervisor was not able to give me a return offer for the same team, since he concluded that the whole rewriting of the backend is too much responsibility for a junior. At first I was sad about this, but he gave me a letter of recommendation and I actually got an offer for the Space↗ Team. This project is in many aspects even more interesting and I am very excited to start soon :)
Conclusion
Regardless of some hurdles, I had an amazing experience! My team was very nice and approachable as well as everyone else in the company. Even though I could not continue working on my project, I was able to land a position at an at least equally exciting project.
The internship taught me a lot and was an experience I definitely would redo.