Colombian reacts to: An internship in Shibuya (by Camilo)
Back in the days, more than 10 years ago, I remember asking one question to myself: “What is interesting about this Dragon Ball series that everyone is still talking about?”, but I didn’t even imagine the consequences of using Google and starting watching that series.
Naruto, Bleach, Death Note, and some other very famous anime went after Dragon Ball. The first transition from Latin American Spanish to Japanese occurred with Bleach, episodes were just not dubbed to Spanish and I was not going to wait for that to happen. The moment I heard them speaking in Japanese something came to my mind: “Why do they speak so weirdly?”. But suddenly I realized that everything made more sense in the original language than in Spanish.
But it was just the start, it became my language of choice at college, I participated in some events at Medellin related to Japan and Japanese, and gradually I found the language and culture more and more interesting. I was definitely going to visit Japan one day. That day would be in 2018/2019.
And then the opportunity came, GIP by HDE presented at Pycon Colombia. Working in Japan and not just visiting it as a tourist was way more interesting, so I applied… and got into the internship!
Preparation
Before coming to Japan, HDE GIP team helped me finding all I needed to stay in Japan: Visa, accommodation, transport commuters. With their help, these preparations were a lot easier to complete.
Then coming to Japan
I was for the first time not only in Japan, but even it was my first time outside of America, in a 14 hours time difference with all the people I knew, but it just made everything more interesting.
Beforehand I chose to come to Japan a week before the internship started for exploring the city a little bit without rushing to go to work straight ahead.
First impressions
Most of the basic things were automated! Not very long after arriving I could see that for taking a train, buying food, going to a convenience store, not many words were required. Machines were all around the place, with English buttons, English signs, and I even could find some machines with Spanish menus, and Japanese vocabularies for daily things were very easy to get used to. “So convenient” became his most used sentence those days.
But, language itself is a big barrier if you want to interact with Japanese people, but that’s not something that will stop you from living in a modern city like Tokyo.
Now HDE, the main topic…
And the day to start HDE’s internship came, following 8 weeks were made by one new experience after the other. In this section, I will try to give you some of the things I consider the most important in my opinion about them.
A few words about what’s HDE
Before beginning, let’s talk about what is HDE. HDE is a company that mainly provides security products to third-party companies, being most of those products based on the cloud.
Back in the days, HDE simply saw that most companies had their hardware an information on-premise, and even if they had very good security software, that information was not safe against some unpredictable natural disaster. A good solution to that problem was cloud, and so they invested in releasing security products for the cloud.
However, the company is heavily investing in developing for other sectors like IoT. They don’t want to only rely on one business as it could be very fragile. I consider this one of the company’s remarkable points as it will keep you trying to find new solutions to problematics in different areas, not only trying to maintain an existing product forever.
“Read this before working at HDE”
HDE is not a typical Japanese company. If you want to work for 12+ hours a day and you hate the right to take your vacations, please don’t come to HDE.
It was a big surprise to me — I was expecting everything from this company, from being very rigorous to be very open-minded. The first hint I got before starting working there was “We do not have dress code, wear anything comfortable as you will”, and when I got there I saw it was real; a very good and not stressful working environment, with places and simple activities to spare like the #fun-coffee-club (That lead me to start enjoying drinking coffee).
The crew
To begin with, I wasn’t the only foreigner at HDE. There are people from China, Indonesia, Italia, Malaysia, Colombia, USA, and many more. It was really diverse. The fact that you can communicate with everyone freely using English makes communication more meaningful.
HDE people are very welcoming and willing to help you. At GIP Lunches you get to know enough people to have a big picture of how is HDE culture and the people within.
And the actual work:
As an intern, you are given several tasks using company’s tech stack, starting with a demo app that follows the development of a full application from scratch, and then helping some of the teams to solve real-time issues with existing applications/products. They will mostly expect you to be a back-end developer, their stack is mainly conformed by Python and Go for back-end and cloud is used as the platform for most of the applications.
I enjoyed working with their stack as it included mature but also very modern and exciting technologies. Basically, the tasks are not “Maintaining a 20 years old single-file PHP web service” but more interesting ones like “Exploring new X tool to use it in an existing app” or “Creating a new Slack bot for X.”
In addition to that, HDE has a Monthly Technical Session where you can share technical topics that you learned or are interested in, giving you the opportunity to keep learning about new topics from your coworkers.
#fun channels
On their internal communication platform, they have several channels prefixed with #fun- (Previously mentioned #fun-coffee-club is one of them). They are meant to be spaces to talk about things not necessarily related to work, like #fun-boardgame, where people discuss and organize the weekly board-game night.
The weekly board-game night was one of the most enjoyable moments of the week as you get to talk with other people and to enjoy one of the many games that there are in the company. After a couple of weeks, we started #fun-dnd: a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign played in other weekdays, which was sadly not finished due to the lack of time we had in the internship period.
There’s also #fun-meme, #fun-gaming, #fun-karaoke, among others, and if you have any other idea you can start a new #fun channel.
My experience in exploring the city
While I spent most of the time being in the company, I also spent many days just traveling around Tokyo, and nearby towns. Together with the interns, we went hiking Hakone mountain, visiting Akihabara and Ueno to find out what’s fun there, went drinking on several Friday nights, and regularly went together to get lunch.
The company will provide you GIP lunches for the first weeks, and you can choose restaurants to go to with a couple of HDE employees. I tried my best to try as much interesting and different food as possible. After several weeks in Tokyo I kept finding new restaurants and food types that I’d never tried, Japan cuisine is very diverse.
Most of the time when I’m not occupied with the internship stuff, I didn’t plan anything to do throughout the day. I just went out of my house, picked up a place for no particular reason, and then started walking. Being “lost” in Japan is pleasant; all the parks, houses, streets are beautiful from my perspective.
What happens after the internship ends
Sad and all, the internship ended, but they told us that the internships are an actual section of applying as a full-timer, and we already had done it, so they asked us if we were willing to continue in the process of applying as a full-timer.
