Pros
- Immediate real world impact: Interns work on the company's core products, and the changes get deployed directly to prod or staging environments. I see my changes in prod at cafes I go to!
- Merit-based task assignment: If you can ship quality features, they will recognize it and assign you more involved tasks. I started with adding some frontend inputs and ended up shipping thousands of lines of backend code and a whole new shopify extension. Likewise, if you can't ship, they will know quickly.
- Management open to feedback: During performance reviews I was asked what would make my experience better, and most of my comments were either addressed immediately or put for consideration.
- Comparatively high salary: Every intern gets RM1400 base salary, and I got something extra for good performance.
- Fun colleagues: The hierarchy is not very strict, due to the company being small (~20 employees) and even the oldest colleagues are not above the age of 40. I can vibe with them.
- 8-5 work hours for dev team: Listing it under pros, since there is less jam/more parking.
Cons
- Poor DevUX: Integrations to external services like Stripe, QuickBooks, Twilio are NOT properly mocked or disabled in local dev environment, so if you are working on features involving those, get ready to get weird errors and ask seniors about them.
- Messy codebase: Partly as consequence of interns shipping so many features, the code quality suffers. Usually there is no one proper way to do something, instead there are 5 copypasted ways to do it with each being slightly different.
