Junior Software Developer Review

My role includes absolutely nothing. After almost 3 years working at this company they have somehow failed to give me anything meaningful to do at any point. Despite repeatedly asking for work, citing the need to actually learn some stuff on the job to meet my apprenticeship standards, and also so I can actually feel deserving of any of the money they've given me or be of any value to my employer at all, I've repeatedly been told "work is coming just sit tight for a bit" over and over. This has been the case for the majority of my peers in the scheme.

Unfortunately not really. I have not been provided with tasks at work, I have not been allowed to shadow anyone or go on training courses, I have done online courses but had no opportunity to apply the knowledge so I don't really know if I've learned it properly. At the university it's even worse. Despite the relentless rate at which our lecturers were replaced, they have nearly all been useless. On top of this, the subjects taught have absolutely no bearing on working at a modern IT company. It's entirely possible to pass the software development degree without writing a single line of code, as there are only two modules in the ENTIRE course which require writing code. One of those doesn't count towards the degree and the other can be dropped. The dissertation requires a program but the code itself is not actually marked so the quality of your software development doesn't matter at all. The other modules cover topics such as Copyright Law, Business Transformation, and Responsible Management (which is as meaningless as it sounds).

At the end of the day, having nothing to do is not the most taxing thing in the world so to say I don't enjoy the program at all would be a lie. However I can still consider the programme a waste of my years providing no benefit to me or my career other than the salary, and I believe I will graduate woefully underprepared for a real job, at a severe disadvantage to university graduates, despite me having 3 years of industry "experience"

The structure of the training is bafflingly awful, although to give them credit they have improved in certain areas since joining. For me, the best example of the organisation comes with the software development module. In year 1 of the degree, where no module counts towards the final grade the technical students all did an Introduction to Software Development module (terrible, but that's another issue). That's all good. However, in year 2, ALL Students had to do the more 'advanced' Software Development module. What that actually means is that the content taught in the module had to be catered entirely to the business students who had mostly never seen code before in their life. This meant it was even more basic than the introductory module, although paired with a much more complex assignment. When we joined, the university days stretched on hellishly for 10 hours with no breaks at all, and if you were unlucky you got lecturers who would not allow food in their class. Presumably for legal reasons we were only officially there for 7.5 hours. The lecturers are a huge potluck, both in quality of teaching and marking. With the quality of teaching however, the bar is set extremely low. We have on I believe 3 separate occasions (that we are aware of) had a lecturer (actually a PhD student) who was only informed that they needed to teach us the night before or even same morning of the class, who had not been provided access to the course materials, and had no idea what to say. I have to feel sorry for them but that doesn't make it okay. One lecturer we have asked us to play the same online "business simulation game" for 7 weeks in a row (14 hours of class time). One week the website was down and he had no backup content. During the current pandemic, that same lecturer has decided that he will hold online classes on a different day to the usual classes. Unfortunately, we are only given one day a week to do university, so everyone is at work and no-one attends his class. Given he has done this for 3 weeks in a row I can only assume it is a deliberate choice to avoid us. Also, about 50% of lecturers only have enough content for maybe 20-45 minutes, then they will either just stand there or leave for the remaining of the 2-3 hour seminar. Worth noting we are not subsidised for travel to university, so it costs people between £10 and £40 (depending on how far they have to travel) to sit and have their time wasted. Oh and I did mention the marking yeah, some lecturers refuse to give higher than around 73% (One has actually told us this themselves so it's not just feeling indignant) and some lecturers will genuinely use all the marks. Feedback given on an assignment is ALWAYS useless, often only a single descriptive word or sentence, and yet marks sometimes fluctuate wildly. For some assignments the entire yeargroup will get bewwn 68% and 72% and for others one person will get 0% while someone else gets 100% There's no consistency so it's just a gamble. There is no structure or support from our employers other than the roles assigned to us when we join. As soon as induction finishes we are in theory, exactly the same as any other employee. However, this one task proves too much for the apprenticeship team. For example, on the first day of my programme, two students in my year were both sent to the same client office to work on the same project. One of them was a project management student, the other a technical student. However, the business student had been assigned a role in software testing, and the technical student had been assigned a role in project management. They quickly raised this, and were shot down brutally and repeatedly. I would love to say they were the only students placed in questionable places, but alas I simply thought they were the best example as they were on the same project working under the same manager. If you're interested, it took 2 years for that technical student to leave project management and get a technical role (although they aren't being given work, possibly due to their lack of experience)

The head of student recruitment provides negative support if that were a thing. As you may expect from what I have written she receives a lot of complaints, criticisms, and suggestions, which must be tough to deal with. However, most of these come from the younger years who have no given up trying. People who try the hardest to suggest ideas to improve the course, or raise awareness if the university does something stupid seem to end up being punished and reviewed harshly. In terms of university, depends on the manager. Some people (like me) have helpful managers who will check in and offer support if they can and be accommodating, and some people don't. However, very few people I have talked to feel supported in terms of training, job progression and learning a role.

An astonishingly little amount. As mentioned above, feedback on assignments is almost nonexistent. On multiple assignments all I have got back is "good". I'm not sure how I am expected to work with that to improve my work but we're not allowed to complain about it. If you ask the same lecturer the same question about your assignment brief twice you can expect two different answers. The whole course is an exercise in futility and nihilism, as nothing you do seems to matter, the mark you get is irrespective of the quality of the work or the amount of effort that went into it, and no-one can tell you why.

It doesn't in any way at all. First because my role doesn't involve doing much, and secondly because even if it did, the modules they have chosen to run are not aimed at a job that exists within our multinational company. Any technical employee I talk to is gobsmacked by the lack of meaningful content in our course. Even in what little technical content exists, There is an extreme absence of depth. We have enough basic training in Java to make a GUI and link it to an SQL database and that's it. I would have liked to see more on software testing, devops, if they covered how to use Git or some form of version control that would be good. I want to see containerisation and docker, and actual real technologies people use like springboot and apache.

Despite how passionate I am about the awfulness of this programme, I have no choice but to give a high score here. The Sports and Social Club scheme is excellent, you pay £5 a month and they will essentially give you a £40 subsidy per person to any event as long as you can get 3 (or 4?) CGI employees on board, and you have to invite all the club members in the area. It used to be a little better organised, there's new management, but that's the only complaint really. I've got a lot of free tickets to the theatre and sports events and dinners out and concerts and the like. It's an excellent scheme.

No

1) They won't support you 2) The training is awful 3) They don't pay very well across the company, so not a great place to build a career 4) I genuinely cannot overstate the awfulness of this training 5) There's a very high chance they will give you nothing to do. I don't know who does all the work at this company because no-one I know does anything.

If you really really decide you have to apply, do some research into the company and some cool project they've been in the news for recently and talk about how it inspired you or something. Talk about why you want to work for CGI specifically, i.e. the potential sideways mobility or the opportunity to transfer to another country.