Internship: Half-time

Posted by Skrud at Monday, September 4th 2006 at 4:08pm

Today is Labour Day, meaning that tomorrow is the first day of classes for just about everybody, summer is over, and it’s back to the grind for another 4 months until winter break comes along.

I spent the majority of the summer – no, the entire summer – sitting at a grey desk, surrounded by grey cubicle walls in an office with a grey carpet, grey walls, and an off-white ceiling (with grey highlights). Can you say “stifling”? My life has become some kind of analogue to Office Space (minus Lumbergh).

My work term started off alright, since I was pretty much designing a system from scratch. That’s challenging, interesting, fun work. Unfortunately after a few months I realized that my only source of eliciting requirements was interrogating a co-worker and trying to figure out what exactly I was supposed to be doing. found that the only way to get any sort of useful answer out of him was to ask the same question 3 or more times, like Mustafa in Austin Powers. Somehow I managed to get something working that my superiors seem to think is working great, yet I’m running out of things to do and they’re running out of stuff to give me. The challenge quickly left the project once I had learned just about all there was to learn. Now it’s little more than mundane code-monkeying around and updating documents.

My Ego

My ego is massive. I need a good kick in the ass, and I know it. I was hoping my internship would provide it, and that I’d feel dumb and worthless and that it would push me to learn and try harder. I was hoping they’d make me realize that I really don’t know anything and that I’ve still got a long way to go if I want to be a successful Software Engineer. At the best case I was hoping to be mentored into a better designer, and at the worst case been left feeling utterly useless.

Instead, the internship provided my big head with a can of helium. The work is mostly incredibly easy and I can do it with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back. On the one hand I like that people listen to what I have to say, but I don’t like the fact that they don’t challenge me. I’m the only person that works full time on my particular project, which means that I have no one else to really talk to about it and it gets pretty lonely sitting in my cubicle in relative isolation. My boss told me that I was making so much progress with the project that they’ll just keep me on it even longer. Great. I’d rather hear “Okay, let’s find you something more challenging.”

Mind you, last week I finally got my first glimpse of how everything is supposed to fit together, that and they did reveal to me that I’m actually working on the most interesting project in the entire department. While that did make me feel much better (and I know that what I’m working on is actually pretty fucking cool), if this is the extent of interesting things that goes on at this company, I’m going to be looking somewhere else for a career.

View of Software

One of the biggest problems I have at work is the fact that there are barely any geeks. It seems to me like most people have little if any formal training in computer programming or design techniques and are actually specialists in hardware who have ended up learning programming on the job. The end result is that few people are actually passionate about programming or software design and that leaves me with few people that I can relate to. There’s maybe one person who’s actually enthusiastic and interested in topics related to software engineering and I can talk to about design patterns, differences between programming languages and methodologies and ideas like aspect-oriented programming.

I think the reason behind this attitude is mostly that Lockheed is not, technically speaking, a software company. They’re an engineering firm, and I think the company itself views software as a kind of “glue” that links together their various forms of hardware instead of an actual product in and of itself. I think software is horribly underestimated here, and when considering a long-term career I’d like to be in a place where software is the primary focus, not a second-class citizen.

Corporate Policy

Being a ridiculously huge company, there are a lot of coporate policy related problems that drive me up the wall. This goes above and beyond installing software on my workstation. The first thing that got to me was the fact that I can’t check my GMail at work. At first I thought “I can live with this, it’s only an eight-month internship,” but now that I’m halfway through I’ve realized that it’s a much bigger annoyance than I originally thought. I’m not an idiot, I know I wouldn’t abuse the privilege of checking my personal e-mail at work, but not being able to is an incredibly frustrating feeling. The same thing goes for instant messaging, but to a lesser extent.

I find myself spending the majority of my workday wondering what e-mails I received and what’s written in them. I get completely distracted by the fact that I feel completely and utterly disconnected from the rest of the globe, and I feel like the world is spinning ahead and leaving me behind. A software company, Microsoft, for example, would tend to have much more enlightened views on this topic. In fact, in a recent interview with Microsoft Lead Design Anthropoligist, Anne Kirah, she says:

The conflict arises because the employers’ benchmarks of productivity are based on something that doesn’t exist anymore. In the old world we measured productivity by just sitting your butt down 9 to 5. We were coming to work 9 to 5, what else would you do at work except work? And I’m still of that mindset myself because I am of the older generation. I find it very difficult when I’m bombarded by instant messages, I find that I just fracture, but that’s just me. But what often happens is that we translate our own experiences and say ‘well, I can’t do it so nobody else can do it. If they’re doing it, it must mean they’re not focused.

What we actually find is that these kids have grown up with it; they have grown up learning how to be social and work at the same time, that’s what they did when they did their school homework before they got their first job. When, in tests, mobile phones have been taken from them or instant messages blocked - when their brains are supposed to be studying - they can’t focus. These kids can’t focus! Now I think that’s absurd, but I have witnessed it over and over.

Now I could always set up a proxy on my home computer or somewhere else and use that, but there’s something inherently dishonest in that kind of action that prevents me from doing it. Besides, I’d probably get into some serious trouble if they found out about it.

I’m hoping someone makes The Programmer’s Bill of Rights into law one day.

Redeeming Qualities

The internship isn’t all bad though. I did learn one thing for sure, which is that I don’t think I can work at such a large company where everything is governed by hundreds of thousands of coporate guidelines and policy and politics and bureaucracy. I’d like to work for a company that understands how to treat its geeks, like Microsoft or Google, and that I’d like to work at a company where there are more like-minded people that I can relate with. I’ve been missing school a lot, because I know there are people at school who’ll take me up on a debate about Java or design or anything.

The biggest redeeming quality of the job are the people. Everyone is super-friendly, and there’s a whole slew of “newbies” that got hired about the same week that I did, so they’re all young, fresh out of college, friendly, and easy to get along with. Most of these people also seem like they’re trying to find their footing in the job market and figure out a place where they can fit in. I know I don’t feel like I fit in at Lockheed, but I’m sure there’s a place for me somewhere out there.

Tags: school, summer, work