Doing it the HENNGE way
My experience interning at HENNGE, Japan
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My name is Din. I’m a graduate student from the University of Toronto and I finished my 6 weeks internship at HENNGE from May 13 to June 14, 2019.
In this short article, I will try to convince you to apply to HENNGE Global Internship Program (GIP) and have the best time of your undergrad.
Part 1: Application process
In this part, I will try to briefly share my experience with the application process. To be honest, most of this information can be found on their website, so feel free to skip this part and jump to Parts 2 and 3.
Unfortunately for me, the HENNGE talent team didn’t fly into Toronto to advertise their internship program at the student career fair as they did for some universities on the West Coast (looking at you UCLA), so I was only able to find information about it online on my school portal. But if you have a chance to meet GIP team members, I strongly encourage you to go talk to them as they are really passionate about the program and will try their best to answer the questions that you might have after reading this article. It’s also fine if you are like me and just apply online as the next step will be the same for everyone: “Online Challenge”
So the application process for GIP officially starts with an online challenge. For many, this might not sound too exciting but comparing this challenge to the other ones I’ve completed, I would say that this challenge was relatively short and fair, as it was basically a test of your knowledge of CS fundamentals.
After completing the challenge, I was contacted by the GIP team to schedule an interview with their tech team. All I remember from that part was the interview didn’t really feel like an “ official interview”, it felt more like a chat with some friendly folks over Skype.
A few weeks after the interview, I received an email from HENNGE, congratulating me on being selected for their Global Internship Program.
Part 2: Onboarding
After being accepted to the program, GIP team took care of my visa application process and flight tickets. GIP offers their interns different time slots from winter to summer. Basically all I needed to was to choose my slot, preferred flight date and submit my passport to the Japanese embassy in Toronto.
After enduring a 14hr flight from Toronto to Tokyo, I had one day to recover from jetlag and flight nausea before my start date. As a side-note, I would suggest you to not eat during the flight if you are flying with Air Canada.
On the Day X, the GIP team assembled all the interns on the 10th floor of Shibuya Glass city building (HENNGE headquarters) and briefly updated us on what was supposed to happen in the next 6 weeks. After this brief meeting, we had the following activities to set us up for work:
Office tour: we (GIP interns) basically walked around the 3 floors occupied by HENNGE and tried not to distract people from working. If I were to describe the office, I would say that it looks like something you imagine when you think of a startup: open space concept, massage room, and free Dr. Pepper vending machine.
Free Lunch with HENNGE people: this part will be discussed in more detail in Part 4 but for now take a look at this beauty!
Phone and laptop setup: IT Support team provided each of one of us with a sweet pack: Macbook Pro’16 (13-inch model) and a Huawei phone (with free 5GB of data). The phone was basically a blessing since I didn’t need to buy pocket wifi or a sim-card and could navigate the city just by using this phone.
After the meeting, we had an intense 2-hr training session where we installed all the required software, had a basic introduction to Python and AWS and were given vague instructions (which were vague for a reason) on our first task….
Part 3: Work
We (GIP interns) started off our internship by building a clone of a famous web app. As I said before, the instructions were pretty general, just outlining the main idea of what we needed to do in the next two weeks without giving too many details. To be completely honest, the first two days were the most stressful days for me at HENNGE as I was completely puzzled about what I needed to do as the end goal was so distant and it seemed that I wouldn’t be able to finish on time. Fast-forwarding to the present day, I’m actually glad that HENNGE didn’t give us a clear task outline as each one of us managed to show something at the end and the results were really different since each one of us had our one way of doing it.
As a side note, the way HENNGE structured their internship was a bit different from the other companies I interned at. As I mentioned before, the first 2 weeks were dedicated towards us learning their web stack by building and deploying a toy web app with the following week being dedicated to deploying an app on the server. Task 2 was highlight of my internship as it was my first time playing with infrastructure as code (IAC) concept.
From what I remember, HENNGE has had these two tasks since the beginning of GIP but they keep refining it from year to year by asking interns for the feedback and trying to incorporate modern technologies. Personally I enjoyed these tasks quite a lot during these 3 weeks, I did get to try a lot of new (for me) cool stuff: such as AWS services, Terraform and Docker. What made me enjoy it was a friendly environment in which I was working. Everyone working around me (in so-called tech-area) was quite knowledgeable and were eager to help if I got stuck which made my learning process significantly less stressful.
After these two tasks, we as interns were placed into different tech groups working on different HENNGE products. The tasks were product specific and therefore required you to learn new stuff on top of what you’ve learned in the past 3 weeks. I won’t go into too many details of what you might end up doing as an intern as it is really product specific but as an example, I got to use Google App Engine, React, PostgreSQl and Golang. But what I can assure you is that even if the task seems difficult at first, you can always reach out to people you work with in the team and they can do their best to help you out.
On this note, I would like to smoothly transition to Part 4, where I will try to explain what makes HENNGE so special.
Part 4: People
Yes, I truly believe that people working at HENNGE make this company so unique and so great to work at. You might be thinking that I got paid for writing it or that I’m just high on HENNGE cool-aid (possibly), but I genuinely believe so. After thinking for quite a while, I think I found the reasons behind this and will try to explain it below
The Screening
As I mentioned in Part 1, the interview for GIP didn’t feel like a “real interview” and the interviewers were focusing on trying to understand me as a person rather than focusing on my technical abilities. At first, I didn’t realize why they would be doing this but after completing my internship I realized why.
Basically each candidate is assessed on both hard and soft skills and since HENNGE is still a relatively small-sized company, it’s still critical for them to hire someone who would mesh nicely with others. And by using this finely grained approach, HENNGE was able to form a company where every team is balanced and have a great dynamic.
This might not sound too surprising as every company nowadays brags about great people-culture. But personally, it was a first time for me to hang out with my colleagues (fellow interns and full-timers from HENNGE) after work and even on weekends.
You might say that I just got lucky and we as interns all meshed nicely with each other and since we were interns, people were just nice to us and you might be right but I think that the luck was not a sole factor.
For the first 3 weeks of our internship, we (GIP interns) would have free lunches every other day with full-time members of the company. I think the decision to have these lunches was a great success for two simple reasons: everyone likes free food and people have an incentive to talk to you.
By having these free lunches, I was able to find people who shared interests similar to mine, listen to some cool stories and most importantly connect with different people and not be stuck talking with my own team all the time (which I used to do in my previous internships).
On top of that, every week I would see a lot of people stay after work to play board games or drink nihonshu (Japanese alcohol)on Fridays. I would also hear people talk about having trips together or hanging out after work.
Taking all of this into account, I would say that HENNGE pays a lot of attention to make sure that if you get hired, you are surrounded by people of a similar vibe.
Culture
Having nice people around you is great, but like every business, what HENNGE wants first and foremost is to get the job done and grow as a company. The way HENNGE handles it is by encouraging people to take an initiative, connect with their colleagues and share their learning with others. It sounds vague at first, but I will try to shed some light by providing a couple of examples.
One of the best example would be MTS. MTS or Monthly Technical Session is a mini-conference where HENNGE employees have a chance to do a TED-like talk on a free topic and present it to their fellow colleagues. What makes MTS special is the fact that people are free to choose their topic (not necessarily technical) and are also encouraged to invite their friends or family to MTS. If you present, you have a chance to talk about something you’re passionate about (as well as improve your public speaking skills) and if you just listen, you can get to know your colleagues better and have more topics to talk about.
HENNGE also has a bi-yearly session with the CEO, where Ogura-san shares the most recent updates with the company and shares the vision of the company and the steps they need to take. These sessions help you to understand the culture of the company, its decision-making process and its future steps for the remaining year. As an example, after this session, I now have a better understanding of why the company changed its name from HDE to HENNGE.
All-hands is like a mix of an MTS and a GIP lunch. You get to know to the most recent company updates, meet new hires and have an amazing lunch for free*
*As Ogura-san likes to say: “You pay for this lunch by talking to someone you’ve never talked before!”
