Hello everyone.
I will being going into my 3rd year of college this Fall, and am currently wrapping up a "Data Systems Engineering" internship at a large municipal utilities company. All I heard before I started this job was how great a company "ABC Utility Co" was to work for.
I have now been given a return offer for the Fall, and would be able to continue working remotely ~20 hrs/week for ~$20/hr. In theory this sounds like an utter DREAM. I knew at the start of the internship there was an opportunity to continue in the Fall, and it was one of the things I was most excited about. Now I feel differently...
The problem(s):
- I have coded probably less than 10% of my active hours worked. My main intern project deliverable is a long written report detailing the gaps I have identified with their current architecture. If this seems like a weird intern deliverable, it probably is. I was told on the second day of my internship I was supposed to "act like a consultant".
- I spent all day today crafting a Google Form to be used for data quality incident reporting. I spent all day. Making a very detailed Google Form. I wasn't specifically told to do this, but since I am basically not allowed to code (see below), I couldn't come up with anything better to do.
- I have zero access to our main ELT tool (Qlik Talend). The licenses are too expensive and they won't spend that money on an intern.
- I have zero access to our change data capture tool (IBM CDC), also in theory due to cost.
- "All these things are too expensive," and yet I'm not allowed to use free software either. Getting approval for a new open-source package takes FOREVER. In the sense that it has not happened the whole summer.
- This company probably only built 10% of its own infrastructure, and the other 90% of things were built by various contractors over the years. What this means is that when I ask questions like "How does X work?" or "Why is X done Y way?", nobody has an answer for me. I have tried reading the contractors' documentation, but it is vague and doesn't give me the answers I need. This is obviously hindering my report, but I am doing my best to piece together tribal knowledge scattered across departments, at times self-contradicting vendor documentation from two years ago, source code, and physical tables in the data warehouse.
- On that note, everyone keeps insisting that "we can't track deletes." I want to jump off a cliff, because -- correct me if I'm wrong -- CDC can **absolutely** track deletes. I have tried politely to express this, but we've had like three meetings over the past two weeks where our inability to track deletes (when ingesting from on-prem to the data warehouse) has gotten brought up.
- I have twice had to explain to people who are supposed to be senior employees that git is different from GitHub, and that BitBucket is not dependent on GitHub. I was also asked "Why would we want to use git?"
- There are also SQL scripts stored as .txt files in the company BitBucket (which just irks me), and two different 8000-line .sql files "to recreate all our tables if we lose them". But that seems like a load of nonsense to me because you could run 400 modular .sql scripts too. They don't need to be in one 8000-line file...
- My manager talks big game about AI-readiness and how they want to move away from Talend and modernize, but everything here moves like a snail through molassess.
My concern:
I want to actually learn things. I want to code and sharpen my technical skills (especially since I didn't become a CS major until sophomore year of college, which was this past year). I don't need to be hand-held, but I want to be supported by a knowledgable mentor. I do not think that exists here. Am I delusional in thinking that somehow I can still gain value from continuing here in the fall?
I think I am perhaps falling prey to sunk-cost fallacy. I spent the whole summer here with nothing worthwhile technical/code-related to put on my resumé, and think I have the notion that if I stay for fall I could make up for it. Or I feel like I've worked so, so hard this summer -- even if not on writing any code :( -- and if I stay, maybe I can finally put some of my ideas (from all the gaps I've identified) into practice and make an amazing story out of it for an intervew about how I turned things around.
I feel like reddit is a cynical place, but reddit also is aware how much internship experience matters, and how cooked the job market is right now. I guess my main question is if the title matters more, or the actual job duties. I just want advice/opinions, I suppose.
If it matters, I do not hope to return here next summer. If possible, I would like an internship at a "real" tech company, but I need to crack down on LeetCode for that (which is a separate convo). I am not married to data engineering as a future career, although it is interesting, and I am also interested in general software engineering, as well as DevOps, but I don't think anyone hires fresh grads for DevOps roles.
For context, the intervew gave the impression this would be a much more technical internship that it actually has been.
If you read this far, bless you, and any advice is appreciated <3