From university to the world of work
Thirteen months as a software engineering apprentice in BBC News Labs
In the final months of my second year at Teesside University, I received an email from one of my tutors about a placement opportunity at the BBC as a front-end software developer. I didn’t think the chances of getting this placement were too high. Plus, it was all the way in London, which has a reputation in the North for being very expensive, populated by tense city folk who aren’t allowed to talk on public transport, and full of noisy traffic.
But remembering my placement officers’ advice that most of us would have to look outside the North East for a job, I set about working through the various stages of the application. I managed to get myself up to the interview stage, which was a face-to-face affair conducted at the BBC’s head office in Broadcasting House. I recall sitting on the train down thinking that this would make a good story even if I didn’t get the job, getting to see inside the BBC.
As I was collected from reception, I suddenly noticed I was standing five metres away from what could only be described (at the time) as the place “where all the News comes from”. This was the BBC’s newsroom floor, as seen on TV — and this is when the whole experience began feeling slightly surreal. Later that day, as I watched police officers and BBC security cordoning off the plaza for an upcoming pre-election event featuring prominent party figures, I realised that the BBC did not feel like the other workplaces I’d seen during previous interviews.
I learned I got a placement with News Labs, the BBC’s innovation team, on the night that the snap election was announced. After a thirteen-month apprenticeship with the team, I’m now off to finish my computer science degree — only now I feel more prepared, not only for university but also for my future career after graduation.
Industry v. University
The biggest difference between working in university and industry is how much more overhead and complexity there is to an industrial project. Although I could be given the same task to complete in either context, successfully completing it as a university module is only a matter of ticking off boxes on the mark scheme.
With an industrial project it’s not so simple. I can’t refer to any definitive answer sheet containing easily digestible points, or seek out a tutor to clarify what some aspect of the work should look like. Instead, I am reliant on the wisdom of my colleagues and my own past experiences.
Additionally, News Labs projects will often piggyback from or act as a framework for other projects to be built on, meaning I needed to be careful not to design something that could lead to frustration for other engineers down the line. It is this scale of interconnectedness that can never be captured within university module work, where your challenge is just to build a model solution to a known and solvable problem.
The type of products that News Labs builds are different to those from standard development teams too. The team works to a much shorter time frame and builds prototypes, rather than production-grade, supported products. This means News Labs projects typically include a much greater ratio of development time versus planning and analysis, and are also much more experimental — and less guaranteed to succeed.
“It is this scale of interconnectedness that can never be captured within university module work.”
This all means that the developers within News Labs seem as though they are given a much greater degree of freedom to make mistakes and learn for themselves than those working in product teams. The team also faces a wider variety of problems, working on everything from internal journalistic tools to audience prototypes that explore new ways of delivering news. It is the job of News Labs engineers and developers to use the six weeks of project time to produce the most effective solution to a problem we’ve been presented with, and report back with our findings.
Projects: News atoms and facial recognition
One of the first projects that I worked on during my placement year was a prototype called FaceRec. It was an attempt to use a facial detection and recognition model trained by BBC Research and Development’s IRFS team to automatically identify prominent political figures in BBC TV News footage.
For this project we got to sit down with people from editing support (who manage the BBC’s fleet of 200 picture editors) and talk with them about how facial recognition could take care of some of the legwork in their current workflows. We then built a tool that showcases the abilities and limitations of facial recognition technology and attempts to automate tasks such as face detection. It features a “faces spotted” histogram as a data-driven seek bar and allows editors to quickly collate all shots of a single person or people in raw video footage.
“The time I’ve spent in industry has provided me a better appreciation of how the world of work works and what role I do — and don’t — want to play in it.”
Another project I worked on was Slicer TV, an experimental application that serves up atomised BBC News TV broadcasts in a way people can more easily consume within their daily activities. This project had two goals: exploring how we might present an atomised TV news experience in a mobile format, and provoking editorial discussions about the implications of atomising linear broadcast content.
We worked with the design agency Magnetic North, whose team held daily stand-ups with us where they demoed iterations on their previous designs and provided new ideas of user interaction models and program flow. We also ensured our design was somewhat open-ended, with some unimplemented features that were meant to help provoke editorial ideas on how to utilise the new format. One example is the ability to switch off the presenter and have the app only display news packages.
Aside from project work, News Labs invests a lot of effort into presenting and showcasing the work it does to different stakeholders within the BBC and to the wider industry at events like MozFest. One of the more prominent presentations I gave while with the team was to Fran Unsworth, Director of News and Current Affairs, to whom I presented the work we had done on Slicer TV.
What’s next?
The real job of a placement year is to give students practical experience working in the real world. Tutors always say that those who take a year in industry will come back a different person, much better prepared for final year.
I can wholeheartedly say I believe this to be true.
The BBC has provided me with a fantastic introduction into the world of work. I’ve been given the opportunity to work on all sorts of projects and have picked up a diverse range of technical skills — everything from UI design to writing project documentation. I have also picked up new social and personal skills, from all the people I’ve met and worked with throughout this year and who have taught me so much about how to communicate effectively and work as part of a team.
I’ve also had the chance to peel back the curtain and see some of the Easter eggs hidden around the newsroom and studios. In the BBC’s Old Broadcasting House, for instance, there is large room with a model house in it, designed specifically for radio dramas and complete with a wide range of clanky doors with latches, a kitchen area containing a plethora of noisy pans, and a staircase and curved narrowing corridor to create the effect of people walking away or towards the listener. There are hundreds of little secrets hidden around the place that you’ll discover from talking to people.
The time I’ve spent in industry has provided me a better appreciation of how the world of work works and what role I do — and don’t — want to play in it.
Special thanks goes to Dave Bevan, who oversaw most of my work. Throughout my placement he taught me a lot about how not to approach a problem; how to slow down and look at what you are doing rather than getting tunnel vision and making no real progress. I’d like to think he also learnt the odd thing from me too. He definitely didn’t used to use as many modern language features before we worked together.
For more information on the software engineering apprenticeship and graduate scheme, please visit the BBC Careers website.
