12 Weeks of Remotely Interning for Atlassian as a Software Developer
Over the hot Australian Summer of 20/21 🌞, I remotely interned from Brisbane as a software developer at the Atlassian Sydney office.
Last year like any penultimate year student, I spent many, many days stressing about not wanting to miss my last chance to get an internship. So much so, that my previous Summer was a juggling act 🤹♀️ consisting exclusively of: reading Cracking the Coding Interview, practising problems on LeetCode, applying for internships, and drinking excessive amounts of caffeine 🍵. You can understand why I was over the moon when I received an offer, and even more so during my 12 weeks of working there. 😃
Hence why, similar to the Infosys internship experience article I wrote a year and a half ago, I wanted to share my recent experience to anyone who’s interested in interning at Atlassian. This article will cover:
- Applying for the internship
- What I (remotely) got up to over the 12 weeks
- Technical details
- What I didn’t expect
- My elevator pitch for why interning with Atlassian was great
TLDR: Atlassian is friendly and fun with lots of opportunities to learn, 11/10 would recommend the internship. 👍
Applying for the Internship
The Atlassian internship application process for the dev role was pretty much what I expected. My interviews were purely remote, so it may be different for past/future intern applicants:
- Resume application: I applied without a reference, I’m sure it helps a bit but don’t stress too much if you don’t have one. Also apply early so that you’re more likely to go through the process faster.
- HackerRank coding challenge: My HackerRank challenge had 4 questions to complete within a specified time limit (I think it was around an hour). This was definitely the technically hardest part of the interview process so brush up on your skills beforehand! You can practise these styles of questions on sites like HackerRank or LeetCode.
- Phone-screen with a recruiter: Why Atlassian? What are you interested in (e.g. frontend or backend)? Can you tell me about one of your recent projects? These were the kinds of questions I was asked during this short phone call. The call was pretty relaxed and the interviewer was mainly trying to understand my background, level of experience and areas of interest.
- Final round interviews: (1) Coding challenge with 2 medium-difficulty questions — Cracking the Coding Interview was great for understanding how to approach and talk through these types of problems; (2) Behavioural interview — I recommend reading up on the Atlassian values and using the STAR method or something similar to answer these questions; and, (3) a project walkthrough where I talked through a project of my choice — don’t get caught up with all the itty bitty technical details here, they’re really trying to test your communication skills and ability to explain a concept and/or system from start to finish.
What I (remotely) got up to over the 12 weeks
Beforehand:
- Office equipment 💻: We had MacBook Pros mailed to us (Woo! 🎉 Although we had to give them back at the end of the internship of course) + a Work From Home budget to buy any office equipment we needed.
- Atlassian Merch ✨: We each received a welcome pack with Atlassian-themed goodies! My favourite picks were the Atlassian picnic rug and water bottle.
When you start:
- Orientation day 👋: So that we weren’t just thrown in the deep end, the first day was a series of onboarding talks that all the interns attended. We also each had our first chat around lunchtime with our managers.
- Support Network ❤️: You’re assigned a manager, a mentor and a buddy from your team to support you during the internship. Your manager helps with growth planning and helping you to achieve your goals, your mentor is there to help with the technical stuff, and your buddy is there to answer your general questions. The campus team are also always available to help and answer questions.
The usual work life:
- Meetings 📣: I participated in daily team stand-ups and other various team rituals. My favourite one was a weekly meeting called Little Victories where teams on the Atlassian Frontend Platform came together to shout out co-workers’ recent achievements.
- 1:1s 💬: Each week I had one-on-ones (1:1) with my manager and sometimes other team members to check in on my progress, ask questions, or just to chat. I found these check-ins were great for learning more about my teammates and other areas of the company.
- Pair Programming 👩💻: Every now and then I’d pair on some work with a more experienced developer. These sessions were super valuable because it was a chance to not just learn how to improve my code, but to also learn about the reasoning behind why certain decisions are made.
- Tools 🔨: Trust me when I say that after a couple months you will become an expert in using Jira (project management), Confluence (for writing documents) and Slack (messaging).
- Weekly Donuts 🍩: Each week we had a new Donut which are randomised Zoom meetings made up of 4 interns. It’s pretty much just another chance to hang out with other interns for half an hour each week.
- Intern co-working sessions 🤝: We had weekly intern-run social sessions. Some of the themes were Spotify beats, New Year bingo and online games. I dropped into a couple and also co-organised the bingo one, it was a lot of fun!
Occasional Extras:
- Intern events 🎨: We had a bunch of super fun intern event nights including games, trivia, and paint & sip. Yep, they actually mailed canvases and paint to us!
- Brown bag sessions 👜: Every few weeks we had talks from Atlassian employees from different roles and specialisations, e.g. Product Manager, R&D, Security specialist, SRE, etc. This was really great for learning about different career pathways within Atlassian, especially for roles you didn’t normally interact with.
- Ship It 🚢: Atlassian’s quarterly hackathon. My team of 3 interns built a Spotify integrated Slack bot and got through to the semi-final presentations!
- Big Bash 🎊: A big yearly event for the whole company. This year it was a space/robot-themed series of online team-based minigames.
- Founder Q&A ❓: The interns and grads had a chance to hear from co-founder, Scott Farquhar.
Let’s get Technical
Before starting the internship, my full-stack experience was full of holes. I could tell you how to design a database but not how to implement it, or I could design your frontend but backend was still a mystery to me. This is exactly why the full-stack app I was given to develop with a graduate developer was perfect for me! It gave me a lot of confidence and was exactly what I was hoping to learn from my internship. That is why it is really important to identify and communicate your goals upfront so that you can tailor your internship experience.
Generally your manager will have a plan in mind for you before you start. The work assigned to interns widely varied, some interns were given projects to work on the whole time, while others were working with their team on general ticketing work — my internship was 80% project work and 20% ticket work.
The majority of my time was spent working by myself on adding new features to my project, but help in the form of pair programming calls or messages over Slack was always available when I needed it. Some other interns did feel a bit more like they were thrown into the deep end, so it really depends on your team and manager.
Overall, it seemed from the final presentations that most interns learnt a lot over the 3 months and felt that their work was meaningful.
What I didn’t Expect
- Culture isn’t just a buzz word, you can really feel how universally nice everyone is at Atlassian and ready to help they are. It’s obvious how ingrained the company values are within the company and team processes.
- At Atlassian there is a confluence page for everything, or maybe even two or three. It’s amazing to have a massive knowledge bank at your fingertips, but sometimes you really have to go digging if you want to find specific documentation.
- Starting a new job remotely wasn’t too bad at all. Zoom worked pretty nicely, and I liked that since I was at home I could stretch, go for a walk or have a coffee whenever I felt like it. In saying that, it would have been nice to meet my team in-person at least once and the difficulty of working from home was definitely taking a toll on some employees.
- Even though I was in a technical role, there was a big emphasis placed on contributing to the team. A lot of the feedback I received from my manager was about how I positively contributed in this area and that it had made a big impact on my team and the surrounding teams. My contributions included writing a team onboarding guide and being involved in a volunteer group to improve work/life balance.
The Elevator Pitch
To wrap up, these are the three biggest reasons why I’d recommend applying for the Atlassian internship:
1️⃣ No stress — The culture is very chill, and there isn’t a lot of pressure placed on interns. In saying this, there’s still an abundance of opportunities to learn more whether it’s through online courses or brown bag sessions, and to go above and beyond as an intern.
2️⃣ Lots of fun — The campus team did an amazing job at making sure the internship was fun and that we felt supported. The large size of the intern cohort (approx. 100 interns) meant the social events could be bigger and more exciting, and that there were a lot of opportunities to meet other interns.
3️⃣ Meaningful work — I really felt welcomed by my team and was able to actively participate in stand-ups and frequently interact with junior and senior team members. I was also working on a project that was highly-requested by other teams so I knew it was going to make an impact and be used long after I left.
Feeling convinced? Head over to the Atlassian Student Careers page for more information! 🙂
