Shopify Internship: Work From Home Edition
Author, Alex Montague, August 23, 2020
TLDR:
- I’m a Web Developer Intern on the Apps Management Team
- Shopify is a “Digital by Default” company
- Shopify offers fully remote internships (and they are awesome)
- Working from home doesn’t stop you from getting sh*t done
Who, what, why?
I’m Alex and I am studying Software Engineering at the University of Guelph. I’m currently finishing up my final internship here at Shopify where I am a Web Developer on the Apps Management Team.
My internship was set to begin May 2020 in the Toronto office, which also happened to be in the middle of a global pandemic. What was to be an in-office experience became a work-from-home summer co-op. Flash forward 4 months and I can honestly say it has been a fantastic experience.
The experience
I previously worked occasional days from home, although I can’t say I started an internship or onboarded entirely remotely! I was apprehensive about how this would all work and hoped that the experience was as enjoyable as an in-person experience. Spoiler alert: it was. I was empowered by a creative company that thought through all of the tools and training that an intern might need and calmed any reservations I might have had.
Shopify shipped out all of the equipment I would need for my internship including laptop, monitor, keyboard, mouse and not to mention the much appreciated swag. I was fully enabled to make my home working area a comfortable and productive space. Another bonus was receiving a remote allowance that we could use to purchase any other home office necessities.
All Shopify interns also went through a remote onboarding for the first 2 weeks that taught us about the company and our roles, Shopify values, and how we would be successful. There was excellent information sharing and I knew who to turn to if I needed help or had questions. I quickly became familiar with and embraced the awesome Shopify culture. Post-onboarding I was prepared and excited to join my team.
Digital by Default
Shortly after we joined, Shopify also announced the transition to becoming a “Digital by Default” company. This meant we would not be constrained to any physical location, and could work from almost anywhere. Shopify was opening the door to remote work for not only us interns, but the rest of the world as well.
All in a day’s work
Overall, working from home was pretty typical to a normal work day. Meetings over Google Hangouts, pair programming on Tuple, communicating through Slack and discussing on Github — these tools made remote work very easy, and I was just as productive if not more so than in person. I was able to collaborate easily with my team, as well as build relationships with other interns through various virtual events run weekly!
Standing out
This internship was definitely the most unique, but it was also one of the most rewarding internships. I was able to gain new technical skills by working on a codebase of broad scale, and I actually owned a piece of work that commenced at the beginning of my internship, and I was able to see it ship at the end of my term. I developed new relationships through virtual meetings with other interns and met employees from all around the company. I also had more time to enjoy personal time outside of work thanks to no commute time. All of the Shopify perks for interns were incredible, including a “Startify” perk that lets you build and start your own Shopify store (shameless plug). Shopify definitely found creative ways to make my virtual internship very enjoyable.
If you are interested in learning more about some of my additional goals and accomplishments at Shopify, I wrote a more in-depth and technical piece on my website.
Thanks for reading, hope to see you (virtually) around Shopify sometime!
Originally published by Alexander Montague, at https://medium.com on August 23, 2020.
