At Seeq, we’ve always been a fully remote company, starting with our co-founders on day 1. Along the way, we’ve developed some pretty strong opinions about how to do remote work. A big part of this has been refusing to take “no” for an answer whenever someone says “you can’t do X in a remote team!” In our experience, a bit of stubbornness and a lot of experimentation has proven that a remote team can do anything a co-located team can do – often better! Whether it’s team building and social activities, inventing and brainstorming together, hack-a-thons, or some other in-person experience – we’ve done it remote as well.
From very early on in Seeq’s history, this has included internships. Our first pair of interns started in 2014, less than a year after the company’s founding, and we’ve not gone a year without interns since – as of July 2024 our Intern Hall of Fame lists 43 former and current product team interns from 5 different countries. Just like everyone else, interns use our awesome Qube virtual office and its integrations with Slack and Zoom to collaborate with teammates. Beyond geographic diversity, we’ve also had interns coming from different places than the typical university student – career changes and “returnships” after a break from the workforce, among others. Our interns write design docs, build internal tooling, take on tricky refactorings, and ship features to customers, just like any of their teammates – there are no set aside “intern tasks” or “intern projects”, just the variety of needs and opportunities typical of a growing company.
Given all this, you can imagine we were pretty surprised to see a fully-remote company like Coinbase requiring interns to work primarily in-office. While this may make sense for their situation, after 10 years of remote internships at Seeq, it’s hard to imagine making that choice – not least because we don’t have a physical office!
So, why put so much effort into internships? We believe internships are a true win-win-win: for Seeq users, Seeq employees, and the interns themselves. While there are many benefits to the long-tenured, stable team we have at Seeq, we also do our best to be mindful of the risks of stagnation and close-mindedness. Interns always bring a fresh perspective – to the team, codebase, tooling, and product. We are reminded how our onboarding could be better; the rough edges of workflows that we’ve grown callused to; newer design patterns or styles that can be incorporated when you have fresh eyes that haven’t been seeing the same product for many years. Interns find places in the product that need better documentation, workflows that don’t make sense, and often have the “slack” to invest in going above and beyond to delight customers with a feature that would have been an afterthought to anyone else. Interns get professional experience in a technical sense, working with highly collaborative team, but even more than that, they get to truly see if remote work is for them, without the commitment of accepting a full time job.
Happily, in what may be the biggest benefit for both Seeq and interns, many join us full time at Seeq! A true validation of our team’s culture is when someone interns at Seeq, goes on to have other internships elsewhere, and then comes back to choose Seeq when they are ready for a full time job. We’ve hired 15 interns into full time roles, and when combined with Seeqers who had internships elsewhere before joining Seeq, ex-interns make up over a quarter of our product team.
The nuts and bolts of how we make our interns successful isn’t really that different from what we do for any other employee:
- Interns have a “mentor” (the main person they work with on daily tasks and a go-to for technical and non-technical questions) and often also have an “intern buddy” who has interned at Seeq in the past (often via the same program). This provides an outside perspective who has not just sympathy but empathy from being in the same position not too long before!
- Interns are fully part of their squad – present in stand-ups, using the same Jira board, working with the same product owner and task backlog – just like any new hire.
- We favor longer internships whenever possible – 4 months is good, but 6 is ideal. 10 week internships feel incredibly rushed now! The extra time allows interns to understand the codebase more, and flex their design muscles, taking on bigger features or other work in the latter months. A little more time is disproportionally valuable, as the intern’s learnings and outputs are both accelerating!
- Interns are strongly encouraged to reach out and get synchronous help as often as they feel the need – almost every new hire errs on the side of too little, rather than too much! Qube makes it easy to see which teammates are available for knock on their ‘door’, so nobody is blocked if their mentor is in a meeting, or offline due to differing time zones. Pair programming and code walkthroughs are key accelerators here too.
- Our internal wiki is full of resources for mentors, whether first-time or long-time: onboarding and first-day checklists, suggestions for first tasks, prompts and reflections for the midpoint and end of an internship, and others.
- As with all new hires, we try to hit the ground running and ship working code on day 1. This goal leads us to prep interns and mentors – either by meeting in person on the first day, or shipping a pre-loaded laptop ahead of time; ensuring our internal tools and IDE setup are self-documenting; and that documentation is clear and easy to follow (and improved for the next onboarding)!
- Mentoring is a fully fledged discipline at Seeq, with its own written guidelines, best practices, and expectations. Mentoring interns and new hires is a common step in career progression, and getting someone off to a great start is valued by managers, enabling mentors to invest fully in their interns without worries of having less time for other tasks.
As a former intern, my internships were valuable far beyond the money I was paid. It truly is a great way to start a career, experience different industries and company cultures, and transition from education or another line of work to working in software. At Seeq we’ve seen this virtuous cycle play out many times, and look forward to many more fully-remote internships in the future!