Emily Feinson
I had wanted to work in software development ever since I was in my teens and coming to Softwire for an internship was a big step towards that for me. I did a fair amount of research into the company before applying and came to the conclusion that, what with the style of work, the flexibility, the social aspects and the general attitudes of the company, if I was going to work anywhere in software, then Softwire seemed like the perfect place. And I won’t lie – having music lessons and music rooms in the office certainly didn’t hurt!
At the start of the internship we had two weeks of training, getting up to speed with C#, JavaScript, JQuery, ASP.Net, Bootstrap and AngularJS, amongst other things. I was studying computer science at university and had done a fair amount of Java so C# was a fairly smooth transition, but had no experience with any of the web technologies. We learned quickly though and there was no shortage of support on hand when we had questions, needed help with something or just wanted some advice from an expert. It was very satisfying to be looking at so many new things in such a short space of time.
We then kicked off the project which I worked on for the remainder of my internship. There were eight interns in the team and we were divided into three sub-teams: front-end, back-end and dev-ops. I chose to be in the front-end team in order to put my new-found web skills to use and develop them further. What I really like about working in a team like this is the amount that can get done when you have eight times the mental capacity and coding time of a single person focused on a problem; when everyone pushes their code to the repository at once your program can grow very quickly. It’s really exciting to see it coming together with the bits you created working alongside other people’s code.
I think, hands down, the things I enjoyed most about working at Softwire were the friendly, flexible and relaxed environment in the office and the fact that everyone really enjoys what they are doing. You are trusted to work smartly and effectively so there’s nobody chasing you up if you are not in at nine on the dot. I think the general attitude of trust towards employees to just get on with everything as they best see fit is a good contributor to the success of the company.
There’s something to be said about working somewhere that simply doesn’t feel like work because you’re just getting paid for doing what you love. I definitely think I’ve been spoilt coming to Softwire and any future companies I come across are going to have a lot to live up to.
