Pros
- People are nice - Access to Udemy Business and other learning resources - Engaging intern project (although the project prompt is littered with typos and broken english...) - Pay is solid (if you can secure affordable housing) - No expectations to work overtime/laid-back work environment for interns
Cons
- They train interns for 4 straight weeks and leave only 4 weeks for actual development. More training sounds fine, however, all interns are expected to listen to a live Zoom call of a lecturer outside of Sapient , who poorly explains things in broken English. There were completely unrealistic milestones from the third-party training vendor, as they expected us to be proficient in React and Angular after 1 DAY of training!!! There were MANY complaints about the training as we were asked to provide feedback, but the supervisors did nothing to change things. Additionally, barely any of the material we "learned" we are using in the project. - Each project team are assigned coaches to help guide them on their assignment, However, many of the coaches have been very unprofessional. For example, many coaches never turn on their camera, don't show up to meetings without notifying the team in a timely manner (or at all), don't facilitate conversation, and/or are ill-prepared to discuss about the intern project. I wish my coaches were a bit more friendly/social as the only thing I know about them is their name and title. However, it appears they are stressed for time being constantly busy. (which is a pretty bad first impression from an intern point of view regarding WLB...). I question why some coaches took up this role when they lack the time to coach. - The project time period is FAR too short and there is too much to learn. I have to learn outside of company hours in order to keep the team on schedule. - Project manager interns have to figure out what to do for 8 hours a day, unless they have a good coach. All they are expected to do is be a scrum-master for a small 4 week project and design prototypes (which is more a UX role imo). Project management is heavily data-driven, however, there is no data for the interns. Instead, many resort to learn web-scraping to get an inkling of data. Some of the project manager interns just watch online courses all day, making me question why are they here if there is so much free time for them. Additionally, most of them don't have a technical background and are tasked to write-up technical user stories. The saddest part is on my team, we are expected to have 2 coaches: 1 SWE coach and 1 project manager coach. Our project manager coach isn't a project manager, she's a program manager (which is a completely different role) and can't provide much guidance to the project manager interns. As a fellow intern, I had to teach my team's project manager interns how to write user stories, which is frustrating since it should be the coach's responsibility.