Tekniksprånget is a groundbreaking, four month internship for graduated Natural Science or Technical high school students between the ages 18-20. The project is run by the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA) and more than hundred companies participate, located all across Sweden. The purpose is to inspire young people to choose higher technical education by giving the opportunity to try the engineering profession. While there are no expectations on the prior technical knowledge of the intern, there are expectations on a will to learn and develop.
Since the middle of August, we have been working as interns at Subtonomy through the initiative Tekniksprånget. Working in the DevOps team at Subtonomy has been incredibly rewarding and we’ve learnt so much, not only about coding and software development but also about Telecom and all that working at an office entails. We’ve gotten to work on both the front end and back end with five different coding languages. While we still find new things to learn each day, we can also see just how much we’ve improved since day one. We went from not even knowing where to start or what to ask questions about to getting an assigned issues and now almost immediately being able to create a game plan on how to solve the problem.
One of the issues we’ve worked on was a bug that caused a graph to not show up. We got to investigate the problem, found the cause and then worked out a solution. We also decided to add a second view as to make the information clearer. Something we have really appreciated about working at Subtonomy is getting to work on actual issues and see our solutions implemented directly to the customers. From the start we got to learn by doing, both from our successes and failures.
A normal day as an intern at Subtonomy includes a morning stand up meeting where everyone shortly describes what they’re working on, looking through a newly assigned issue, responding to feedback on some of our previously submitted code and playing a game of foosball during lunch. There are no strict office hours and usually you will find half the company working from the office and the other half doing distance work. This has been great, and everyone has still been happy to answer questions over chat or in person.
We feel the company has welcomed us with open arms. There is always someone willing to answer our questions and we’ve gotten to join the kick-off, Christmas party and other work events. We have enjoyed our time as interns tremendously and are happy that we will both continue our work at Subtonomy during the next year.
// Isabel Thedéen & Hugo Lindblom