For each year that passes, we receive more people applying for curricular internships at Mindera, as such we thought that would be a good thing to offer some transparency into how internships work.

As with a lot of things you might have read before — like handbook, self-management, feedback and salaries part 1, part 2 & part 3.

How are internships defined?

Minders can propose projects, either things that are useful to use within Mindera or ideas for products that can be interesting for an internship.

We will then check how many interns we can receive and the most promising ideas that will be picked.

After that, for each idea, a mentor will be found (normally we just ask around who wants to be a mentor). That means: who has time and especially wants to do it… and of course, they also need to have all the checks required by the institution the intern comes from).

After we have internships and mentors we’ll send all that info to universities to create more awareness of the available internships (We’ll also try to make them visible on our social networks or site).

Note: Candidates will always have the space to apply for an internship with their own specific idea. We’ll try to pick the ones we find interesting if we have the capacity to receive them.

Applying: how?

We used to have several ways but… we have now simply opened a Workable pipeline that is always opened, please submit there as if you’ll send an email we’ll redirect you there.

If you can’t find it on Workable, we might not have vacancies open at the moment. So email us at internships.pt@mindera.com.

Why do we ask a lot of things on the Workable form?

Why?

What do you want to actually do on the internship?

Is it front-end, back-end, mobile, full stack, machine learning, DevOps, QA, QAE? You can also mention the internship proposals you already know and want to apply to (by order of preference).

CV?

Let me give a hint on this: add stuff that is relevant — projects you did in the area that you want to work in, an open source you contribute to, or anything that you think shows us you know stuff) — Don’t focus on grades, we will interview you to check your knowledge. The grade is generally irrelevant. Actually, your degree is mostly irrelevant.

Knowledge isn’t… and that’s what we are looking for.

Why do we want/need to know when you start and end the internship?

For obvious reasons we need to know… but candidates tend to forget to share.

When do you need an answer? Yes or no from us.

This will help us internally. We check our capability to receive interns from time to time. Unfortunately, the timing may not match with our internal capability to have that answer… that will help both sides to define better expectations.

I’ve applied, now what?

STEP 1 — The submission

We’ll reply with a follow-up.

⚠️ Warning: We at Mindera sometimes take a while to do this step due to the number of candidates. Please submit with some time.

I have done this, but I haven’t received any answer, now what? If you haven’t received an answer, make sure you have sent all the information needed and email us again asking for an answer.

We receive a lot of applications, we can just accept a small fraction of them… if you don’t get in now, you can reapply after the internship for any of our open positions!

We always reply, but it might take a while when we are receiving hundreds of candidates. 🙏

STEP 2— The exercise

• The exercise: We’ll send an exercise via an automated platform ( like DevSkiller) to candidates, so we can get some information on candidates’ skills faster (as you’ll understand it’s unviable to do 200 interviews for internships).
  

• The exercise has multiple tech options: BE in Java, FE in React, Native Android and iOS and so on.. according to the tech used in each internship. You can pick which tests you will do. We prefer quality over quantity. If you do just one tech test and it’s great, you’ll move forward.
  

The mentors will then handpick a few for the interview and an email will be sent with more information on the next step. The rest will receive an email explaining that their process will not proceed.

STEP 3— Tech interview

Interview? For an internship?

Remember we said that your grades didn’t mean a thing?

We mean it. That’s why we interview people.

How? Normally the person that is available to receive you as an intern will do a quick round of questions on software engineering (we ask you in what language you are more comfortable), protocols, and everything a geek person would be curious to know about.

We don’t expect you to know everything… but it helps to have a solid base.

⚠️ This interview will normally take about from 30m to 1h and can include whiteboard coding.

STEP 4— Cultural Interview

We’ll talk about Mindera’s culture, and how we work and leave space for you to tell things about yourself and ask whatever questions you have.

STEP 5— Proposal

All the previous steps went smoothly? Great!

You now have a proposal to come to do an internship with us!

Congrats!

My process isn’t following those exact steps…why?

Remember, we are a company that actually works with self-organisation.

Probably the mentor(s) for the internship you are applying for decided it was better to do other things maybe:

• to either do an extra interview (trying to be fair when choosing between 2 candidates that seem very similar)
• to skip the initial exercise as they are few enough candidates that they can interview everyone
• …
  

We don’t have things written in stone. Also, you can always ask what’s next. 🙂

I’m in 🎉! Great…let’s get stuff done!

The Minder that interviewed and passed you will now be your mentor during your internship within Mindera (and also “officially”).

Here self-organization also kicks in. You will have them providing some guidance, and he will probably point you sometimes to other Minders that can help you in specific subjects, but we look for people who thrive with freedom and don’t want someone always looking over their shoulder.

Get ready to receive some links to study or to be challenged:

How do you think you should approach this problem?

But also to learn from our previous experience on projects.

By the way, am I going to get paid?

Mindera offers a symbolic amount to cover your expenses while you are an intern. As it changes, per year, please ask for more information during the cultural interview.

Ways of working

Every mentor will have a different way to approach this, but I can share my own after having 3 interns, step by step:

1. Is this idea worth it? Are there others doing the same? Do we really need it? — That tends to generate something that academia calls State of the art (on the product)
2. How could we implement it? — Choosing the right tool for the job. That means we shouldn’t just use Java because that’s what you know best. It generates something called State of the art (on technologies)
3. What should it actually do? How do we measure success? — Generates Requirements (functional, non-functional..)
4. How should we do it? — Ways of working and planning (Waterfall, Agile, SCRUM or Kanban and so on)
5. Automate all things — Who likes to do the same thing twice? Let’s have pipelines, automated tests, scripts and all that voodoo magic!
6. Iterate — Iterate, perfect, show, iterate, perfect, show.

Also, don’t forget to write it all down to show to your jury. We won’t be policing your report, we assume as with everything you are an adult and will add time on the plan to do it (within the working hours).

I’ve finished my internship, now what?

Most of the interns that join us for an internship will remain with us moving to Graduates (what we call people that have just finished their degree and/or have no working experience).

As the end of the internship approaches, you can do something truly amazing to know what’s going to happen — most people forget or are somehow afraid to do it… speak with your mentor about it.

Ask questions.

Do I have to remind you we don’t bite? (Except for that one time with Paulo P. … well let’s not talk about that).

What would be a successful internship from our point of view?

We look forward for you to have a great grade on the internship, and we want to help you achieve it but it heavily depends on your report and that’s mostly up to you.

We also hope you would like to stay, but there are a lot of other interesting places around, so no hard feelings if that’s not the case.

So how do we “measure” the success? It’s really simple.

1. You had fun and learned stuff.
2. We had fun and learned stuff.
3. You did what you proposed and it’s working flawlessly or learned a lot of stuff when things went south.
   

That’s it.

Hope to see you soon!