Making Intern Assignments Is Tricky. Why Self-Selection Works for Us.
We’re now in our eighth summer of managing intern assignments using our self-selection process for software engineering internships. Counting the six interns this summer, we’ve had a total of 58 software engineering interns use the process, and 65 teams offer themselves up as potential hosts. Why We Decided to Experiment with Self-Selection We’d been doing […]
Recruiting When We’re All Suddenly Remote
When making preparation for SEP’s shift to working from home during COVID-19, we knew we didn’t want to lose momentum on our recruiting. We get to talk to lots of great candidates, and putting them on pause for a month (or potentially several months) seemed like a decision that would lead to us missing opportunities. […]
My Favorite Tool That I Struggle With
What tool do I use more often than any other, often while using other tools? What tool am I certain can be an aid in solving almost any problem, if used properly? What tool do I struggle with the most, even though I probably complain about other tools much more often? What tool have I […]
Beware of Solving Things Yourself
There’s one recurring thing I’ve seen new hires at SEP struggle with over the years. Most commonly, this is something we see in hires that are fresh out of college, but sometimes it shows itself in hires that come to us with years of experience in the industry. While we try to eliminate it in our new […]
Fresh Out of Hope? Not Hardly!
It’s been a busy week here at SEP; we’ve had a lot of new faces join us. Seven interns and two new hires in one day (oh and there was another new hire that joined us middle of last week as well). Plus we’ve got three more new hires on the way on Monday. Guess who’s […]
Deadline-Driven Development
Deadlines. We’ve all run into them. We might be talking about a project at work or filing our taxes each year. But deadlines usually get a bad rap. Everyone loves to complain about deadlines. But I like them. What? Why in the world would I like deadlines? Because they help remind me to ask questions. […]
SEP at 50?
You may be thinking to yourself “Wait? I thought SEP was celebrating the 25th anniversary this year?” You’d be right. But we’ve been asked to think about what the future holds. And while thinking about what SEP might be like in another 25 years feels incredibly difficult to me, it is also fascinating to me. […]
How to [Fail to] Get a Job at SEP
When we go to college career fairs, professors will often ask us to come give talks to their classes about something useful. After one of these requests, I was contemplating giving a talk on “How to Get a Job at SEP” (due to some of the experiences that day). Given that it is unlikely I’ll […]
That Wasn’t So Bad
Have you ever feared giving someone bad news? Perhaps you needed to tell a friend that you lost something you had borrowed from them? Or perhaps you needed to tell a client that you weren’t going to be able to hit their deadline? I’d wager that just about everyone reading this has had to deliver […]
