8
YADU
5y

So i started an (8 month) internship in January. Team of 4 (2 senior/mid level devs + boss) plus 6 or so other people in our other office overseas. Everything was going really well IMHO. Boss's feedback for halfway through the internship was good too.

First 4/5 months were great: loved the team, got feedback and help when i needed it, wasn't stuck doing support too much, etc.

This all changed when both the devs moved to our other office. My boss works from home a lot and has frequent meetings, so i hardly see him. I have a 1 hour window first thing in the morning if i need help from the devs overseas. After that im on my own.

If i get stuck, even on something very small that a more senior dev could explain in 2 minutes, I'm stuck either unable to work or figuring it out (wasting hours of time) for the rest of the day.

On top of this, since I'm the only one around in our office, im stuck on support every week which takes hours of my time usually. Last week support ate up most of my week, which put me way behind schedule on my other work. (That was an unusually busy week of support.)

Feeling incredibly frustrated right now, just wanted to get this off my chest.

Comments
  • 1
    internship in a nuclic reactor? What kind of internship are we talking about here?
  • 0
    I hear ya. You can't be expected to accomplish more than what you're doing under current conditions. Have you brought this up with your boss?
  • 0
    @sandeepbalan
    Game stuff. I'm finding it incredibly stressful.
  • 0
    @YADU One more month. right? Take it easy. Just reduce your speed. Slowly come back to normal.
  • 2
    @ihatecomputers

    I have. The senior guys dont seem to realize how much help interns need though, or how much time i end up wasting on support. (They all alternate weeks for support, plus are much better at it than i am.)

    I just got chewed out this morning for not having an 'easy task' that should take '1 or 2 days' done (I've spent 2 days so far with very little progress.)
  • 0
    @sandeepbalan

    Until the end of August so more like 1.5 to 2.
  • 0
    @YADU Just do what experienced devs do when they get stuck.

    Google the problem, understand what the underlying issue is (i.e. DON'T just copy paste from SO!), what people have tried and what also doesn't work and why.

    Only then adopt the accepted answer on SO to your problem.
  • 3
    @Fast-Nop

    This is what ive been trying to do. A lot of my problems are very specific to our code though. Stuff like "where is such and such located in our codebase", "how do i set up such and such", "why is this code this way", stuff like that.

    Our codebase is 500k lines of really messy code. A lot of stuff i need isn't documented, it just lives in people's heads.

    So it takes a long time to figure this out on my own, vs 5 minutes if i ask someone who knows our codebase (all of whom are overseas).

    This is part of what's so frustrating. I could have my questions answered so quickly if i were in the office with these guys. Instead i have to dig through 10+ years of undocumented code.
  • 0
    @YADU holy shit, that would suck also for experienced devs. :-)
  • 1
    @Fast-Nop

    Tell that to the senior dev that we've just hired for my office. I'm sure he'll have a fun time once I'm gone.
  • 0
    The communications in this distributed team sound crap. Is there no way for team members to contact each other during the day, such as slack, hip chat, or even old fashioned email?

    Also, don't you have some time tracking process that will help indicate how much time you spend on support?
  • 0
    @nibor

    We have slack and email. The issue is the time difference.
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