A World-Class Internship From A World Class Company.
It’s hard to think about tech companies without thinking about overwork. People working in the endless crunch times with no time to spend outside the office. Even The Social Network has a scene where “plugged in” coders work late into the night fueled by Red Bull. So when you think about a Japanese tech company you’d think of a work culture that values hours worked above everything.
But that couldn’t be further from the truth at HENNGE.
I recently finished up an internship at HENNGE and I feel like I’ve found one of the best-kept secrets in tech. An internship program that values and respects its interns, promotes communication among interns and full-time employees and provides interns with valuable market skills.
Initially, I carried the worries that the working hours might be quite long at HENNGE. Those worries were allayed when it was shown on our work contracts that we would only be working from 10 am to 7 pm with a 1-hour break every day. “Not bad”, I thought, “but we’ll see how they actually follow through on this”. The words in the contract weren’t just talk. I found that my mentors and other employees would actually encourage me to leave work if I was staying late and I never felt like I had to work above and beyond the hours in the contract.
The internship is designed so that interns get a lunch paid for by HENNGE twice a week accompanied by two other employees, so the 1-hour lunch break was not only encouraged, it was and paid for by the company. I had never guessed that a company would ever do anything involving food that wouldn’t be planned around making sure that people stayed at work longer. And it worked. I’ve done other internships and full-time jobs where I defaulted to eating at my desk in order to get things done, but thanks to the internship lunches I was encouraged to take the time given to me to relax and take a lunch break even when HENNGE wasn’t paying.
The full-time employee’s attitudes in this made more sense as I asked about how the full-time jobs work at HENNGE. Employees are paid a salary, but they clock hours and can earn overtime. When employees are working too much HR will actually give people days off if they’ve been working too much. This blew me away. Every workplace these days claims to care about work-life balance, but HENNGE is the only company I’ve ever heard of actually financially incentivizing itself to provide it.
At HENNGE I was also invited to enjoy some after-work activities. I was amazed to see how many organizations and clubs the company enabled people to create. From the weekly board game nights on Wednesday to playing Dungeons and Dragons on a Monday holiday in the office, to a semi-daily coffee club, HENNGE enables its employees to organize and use it’s space for everyone’s enjoyment. Communication is emphasized by Ogura-san, the CEO of HENNGE, and are reflected by the monthly communication lunches. These lunches are provided by the company, but they’re not free, you have to pay for them by communicating with someone you usually wouldn’t communicate with from the company. It’s cheesy, but in the genuine way that endeared me.
And HENNGE doesn’t skimp on the innovation. They’re the leading cloud security provider in Japan and they’re looking to branch out even further than just Japan.
One of the ways they’re trying to do this is with the Inspire Matsuri program. I didn’t know what it was at all initially, but I eventually found that they had challenged everyone in the organization to provide ideas for new products. There was a vote on the ideas, and fancy dinners were given to people who had created the ideas that got the most votes. Going forward, people in the company are going to be matched with the idea holders to prototype them and gauge the viability of the idea to take to market.
And speaking of innovation, my internship project was to research a possible new product HENNGE is looking at: IoT in the enterprise space. My project was to see how Bluetooth LE beacons could be used to identify which employees are using which meeting room. This could be used to recognize when meetings go early or late and allow people to extend their meetings or end them early to allow more economical use of meetings rooms. It was a great chance for me to get reacquainted with Android development, and generating REST APIs with OpenAPI 2.0.
It was exciting to get a chance to work on a project that was unique and anchored in something useful for the company. I couldn’t ask for anything more out of an internship project.
The internship had two phases: a training phase, and a project phase. During the training phase, we were taught how to create a web app, containerize it, and deploy it to ECS. We were then taught how to use terraform to generate AWS infrastructure using code. It was fun getting to see how much each intern used while trying desperately to spin up some AWS resources.
One of the best ways to network in tech is to give talks at conferences, but taking those first steps to creating a talk and workshop a concept can be kind of intimidating without joining something like a meetup or a public speaking group. At HENNGE, there’s an internal conference called MTS (stands for Monthly Technical Session) that occurs monthly. The interns had to give a talk, having that opportunity to workshop a talk, and get the chance to speak publicly in front of a technical audience is inspiring. I know that it won’t be the last time I give a talk and I might just have to give a talk at a local meetup group now.
Overall, I had the experience of a lifetime and I made a bunch of new friends along the way. I’d strongly recommend that anyone interested in tech take the HENNGE challenge and try to come over here for an internship. You won’t regret it.
Steven Miller is a Software Developer from the United States. He studied Computer Science at the Georgia Institute Tech at Georgia, United States. Steven interned at HENNGE Global Internship Program from 21st January to 1st March, 2019.
