4 things I wish I knew before coming to HENNGE

Having heard about a Japanese software engineering company taking interns from all over the world, I was intrigued, but healthily doubted my decision to come and intern here for the summer. With a myopic image of Japan coming from Studio Ghibli movies, I had million of questions about how my time here was going to unfold: what the work culture at HENNGE would be like, what technologies would I be exposed to and etc. If you’re currently in a similar position and considering HENNGE as a potential summer gig, this article is for you.
- HENNGE is a SaaS company
A bit embarrassing to admit, but I only vaguely understood what the main focus of the company was up until the first couple of days here. HENNGE is a B2B SaaS company with HENNGE One being the main product, a “cloud-based identity and access management solution” that unifies all services used within a company into a singular portal. They dominate most of the Japanese market and are currently trying to expand internationally. With security being one of the selling points, you can expect stricter development guidelines than ones you might be used to.
2. HENNGE feels like a startup
Coming in with urban horror legends about Japanese overworking culture, I was expecting heavy micromanagement from my mentors, but I was pleasantly surprised by the mellow work environment. Ogura-san, the visionary CEO of HENNGE, embraces self-direction and experiments, and recently even renamed the company name to “変化”, meaning “transformation”. The company makes extensive use of open spaces to endorse the flow of new ideas and relationships. With the primary language being English, you’ll easily get by with minimum Japanese. In case you want to improve your Japanese, there are plenty of fun people here to practice with!
3. HENNGE offers a fantastic introduction to cloud infrastructure
The internship program spans 6 weeks, with the first 3 weeks being devoted to training. The first 3 weeks were devoted to building a Twitter clone with an AWS infrastructure around it, using Terraform to manage AWS resources. The latter half is spent on a project with a smaller team that you’re assigned to. With the program itself being relatively short, and the training phase taking up half of program, it can be difficult to leave a significant impact at the company. Coming mostly from a front-end and mobile development background, I believe it still proved to be an invaluable learning experience in cloud infrastructure management with a wide exposure to numerous Amazon Web Services.
4. Japan is a unique cultural experience
I’ll leave the job of unpacking the intricacies of Tokyo to travel blogs, but I point out that Japan is absolutely worth visiting. It’s quite fascinating to see how millions manage to live peacefully in a relatively small island. With a huge variety of food and amusingly expressive language, Japan won’t leave anyone indifferent.

