Pros
The technologies used by the data team were very interesting, especially the Scala programming language which was fun to learn and use. There are some nice benefits like the free coffee, occasional fruits and sweets, and the weekly sport activities.
Cons
No mentorship program for interns. You are left to work with random employees that only provide direction from time to time. Most questions are answered with "Have you tried asking chatgpt?" and, only after struggling on your own for a few days, will you receive some sort of help. I have received multiple documentations written solely by ai, where the senior had no idea what was going on with the task. The codebase was also a mess. I have encountered giant monolithic architectures, production code that did not compile, and many examples of overly complex spaghetti code. Most of these issues arise from the "results-oriented" leadership that claims that any solution (no matter how frail) is good if it's written quickly. That leads to ai generated garbage code that is never reviewed and is simply pushed to prod. The last point, on work-life balance, is hard to talk about. Simply put, everyone works in their free time. I have seen commits at odd hours of the night. Employees often talk about the work they've done over the weekend. People are always active on slack during their holidays. Worst of all, you will receive messages in your free time with the expectation that you respond and work remotely. I talked with the other 10 or so interns (which all decided to quit or were fired) and we all received such messages at night or during the weekend. What made me quit was the fact that the CTO screamed at my team for 20 minutes or so because some people only worked 8 hours a day and we weren't putting in enough "effort". While the first two arguments point to a lack of competence in leadership, this last one reveals a truly sad reality, one with constantly over-worked employees and toxic management.