The office was located in a large twenty story building in the business district of the city that I live in. IBM owned three floors in the building – two for sales and one for software development. The software development floor housed 40-50 employees in a small cubicle farm that was surrounded by labs and conference rooms. Everyone, including managers, worked in a cubicle. Most of the workers were OTI holdovers and had been at the office for years.
The office environment was very laid back. Work schedules were flexible and there was no dress code. A lot of people worked from home on Fridays. Every month we had a dessert party to celebrate birthdays. Though most of the office was older, there were three other interns and two recent college graduates who were in their early to mid 20s. Part of what made the internship so enjoyable was that we all became good friends. We ate lunch together everyday and hung out quite a bit on the weekends.
The compensation and benefits were very good. The pay was substantially higher than any of the other offers I received. As an intern, you got your own cubicle and laptop, and accrued paid time off for each hour you worked. In the kitchen, there was a fridge filled with free soda, juice and water. Employees were able to receive savings from a wide variety of vendors through the IBM discount program. With this I was able to get 20% off of my monthly phone bill.
All interns were given a meaningful project to work on. For my assignment, I helped develop a set of extension classes for Sprint’s API. The majority of my time was spent working on an mp3 player that would later be added to one of the new Blackjack phones. All of my code was written in JavaME and developed in Eclipse. For testing, we had access to various smart phones which simulated the environments that our programs were being written for.
The management style in the office was very easy going. There was no micro management and project leads were very hands off. Each intern was assigned a mentor whom they worked closely with on their project. My mentor was a recent college graduate who had interned at the office before. He was a great guy and I was able to learn a lot from him. Interns were also required to give status updates during bi-weekly staff meetings.
Overall, I couldn’t have asked for a better experience. I learned a lot about how companies managed large software projects and was able to gain real world experience developing commercial applications. I was also able to form quality relationships with people that I still keep in touch with.
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