Want to Experience Working in Japan? Join HENNGE Global Internship — Hybrid Edition.
Do you ever wonder how is it like working as a software engineer in Japan? Long overtime work? Wearing a formal suit in the office or in a company where work-life balance is not a priority? Well, I’m not sure if that’s true for most Japanese companies; it could be true for some traditional Japanese companies, but it’s certainly not true for HENNGE.
Hi, I am Ray, a graduate student from the University of Tokyo. Today, I would like to share my experience working at HENNGE as an intern through the Global Internship program. I will go over all of the activities that I participated in during the internship, and hopefully, this will be useful for those who are looking for an internship or are trying to find a software engineer job in Japan.
Preparation
Maybe some of you already know, but Japan is not really known for its paid internships especially with international students due to restrictions. However, it’s nice to know that HENNGE has found its way to compensate its interns through means of subsidies: round-trip airfares, housing fees, daily expenses, and commuting fees. It’s really important to stress that they offer subsidies since you are going to live in Japan for a month which can be expensive! In my case, since I was already in Japan, most of the subsidy goes to the daily expenses and commuting fees, and I even got a MacBook Pro for my internship (though I need to return it afterward at the end of the internship). In addition to the subsidy, I also got the welcoming gifts from the GIP team which included things like company T-shirts, stickers, some small gadgets, and last but not least, a warm welcoming postcard!
Office Tour & Get-to-know-you lunch
Since I was already in Japan, I was lucky to be able to go to the Shibuya office and had an office tour with the GIP team. The overall feeling of the office was relaxing. There are no designated desks for employees; they can choose where ever they want to work from the free space. And if you are tired, you can take a break in the resting room. If you are tired of looking at your computer screen, you can also choose to work at a chair, facing a wonderful view of Shibuya.
After the tour, we went to a Japanese restaurant and had lunch with our mentors and the members of the GIP team to get to know each other. Although we only had one lunch due to COVID-19, it was still a good chance to finally meet them in person (although we have met virtually).
The tasks as an intern
For me, the internship was both in-person and virtual since the COVID-19 cases weren’t decreasing in Japan at the time of our internship. We were able to choose to either working from home or work in the office, but most of us chose to work from home(working in the office was not mandatory at all!). However, working from home didn’t make it hard to communicate. We were basically having meetings every day through zoom or google meets. If you have any problems, you can always drop a message in the slack channels. The mentors will get back to you very quickly. This is perhaps one of the benefits of working remotely, and I am glad that HENNGE made the communication between mentors and interns so easy!
For the tasks, we had two assignments: one full-stack project and one DevOps project, both took two weeks. The full-stack project will use Python / Go as the backend and you can any other frontend framework that suits you. For the DevOps project, we will use Terraform to deploy our first project into AWS. You will need to learn many technologies that the employees use in HENNGE, I won’t list all of them here. But don’t worry, your mentors will be very nice (in general everyone is very nice) and will be able to help you along the way.
Beyond the tasks
Learning the technology stack the company uses is one of the big parts of the internship. The other important part is to know about the company. You will have many opportunities to meet different teams and have conversations with members other than your mentors. For example, we had fun-donuts session in which we will be invited to meet people from different teams. We also had the virtual board game night every Wednesday night where you could enjoy playing card games with other members.
If you are a geek who likes technology, there is the Monthly Technical Session(MTS) in which people give short talks about the technology that they like or want to share with other team members. I was lucky to be invited as a speaker for this session. I was really happy to share something that I learned at my university.
Concluding Remark
Finally, I’d like to encourage people who are reading this article to try the Global Internship Program offered by HENNGE. Not only will you be able to learn practical software skills, but you can also build up connections and explore the working culture in Japan. Although at the time of writing, the internship is still in a remote manner. I hope by the time you join the next internship, you can come to visit Japan and enjoy an in-person internship.
Ray Chan, from Hong Kong, is a Master's student at The University of Tokyo in Japan. He interned with the HENNGE Global Internship Program from July 5th to July 30, 2021.
