Pros
1. This company has a great intentional culture. The owners have made it clear to everyone again and again that serving the interests of their employees will always be a top priority. Every decision they make about the company shows that they want to take care of their employees and make a secure future for them. 2. This internship has shown us a full view of the process of software engineering. Each of the other interns and I participated in the entire process, including research and product decisions, requirements engineering, coding a new feature, testing, and maintenance. Each of these steps has been an invaluable experience that I know will help me in the future. 3. I've learned a TON of technical knowledge from this internship. As a senior CS student in college, I came into this internship with a lot of conceptual knowledge but very little applicable experience. The engineers at TEA were very gracious and were able to help me build off of the knowledge that I already had and develop real-world skills. I gained more skills from this internship that I can put on my resume and talk about in interviews than from every school experience that I've ever had. 4. The work that I've been able to do during this internship has been meaningful work that impacts real customers. The people in charge of the internship care deeply about making it something that interns can walk away from feeling like they did something important that will make people's lives easier. I have even been able to interact 1-on-1 with some of the top people in the company, such as the CEO, the head of product, and the head of engineering.
Kontras
1. The internship has had a marked lack of structure. There have been several issues we've come across such as canceled events/meetings because our managers were busy and forgot to account for us. 2. The code is very disorganized, especially on the backend. This is an issue that all small companies seem to face, and TEA is no exception. It is very common to come across a block of code or database attribute that no one understands and can tell me what it does, and it gets frustrating, especially as an intern, when you can't find the help you need to proceed with your work. As of writing this review, the backend engineers have discussed possible solutions going forward, but there have still been no real actions taken to address this. 3. There is sometimes miscommunication between our managers that ends up setting us back days or even weeks. The interns have been expected to be the ones making sure everyone involved in a project is on the same page before proceeding. This has caused problems because we sometimes don't see the entire picture and don't know that someone has problems with our implementation of a solution. 4. Although the interns were hired for software engineering, we ended up working for over a month researching what we should actually do for our project over the summer. There were many potential pitfalls with what we were originally encouraged to work on, and our proposed plan went through over a dozen iterations before a final decision was made. In the meantime, the only coding we did was minor bug fixes and nothing substantial that can be shown to recruiters.