Web and software development internship and apprenticeship: finding your place in a team

What the developer's job really covers

Behind the word developer hide very different realities. Web development covers the websites and applications viewed in a browser, with a visible part (the interface) and a hidden part (the server, the database, the exchanges with other services). Software development is broader: desktop applications, internal tools, business software for banking, healthcare or industry, mobile apps and embedded systems.

In both cases, most of the time is not spent writing brand-new code. A team spends long hours understanding what already exists, fixing bugs, adding small improvements and checking that nothing breaks. This is precisely what is entrusted to an intern or an apprentice: well-defined tasks, inside code that already exists.

Keep this picture in mind before you apply. An impressive personal project is not enough; what reassures a technical manager is evidence that you can read, carefully modify and explain a piece of a program that you did not write yourself.

Internship or apprenticeship: choosing according to your path

An internship is part of a course: a professional bachelor's degree, a university technology degree in computing, a master's, an engineering school or a vocational title. It rests on a three-way agreement between your school, the host organisation and you. In France, beyond a certain length an allowance is compulsory; its minimum amount is set by regulations and changes, so check it with your school or the company.

An apprenticeship (an apprenticeship or professionalisation contract in France) gives you employee status, with a rhythm split between the company and the training centre. Pay depends on age, year of training and type of contract; the scales are public and change, so look them up at the time of signing.

A few pointers to decide:

• you aim for a specific qualification and want to fund your studies: an apprenticeship is often better suited;
• you are partway through a course and want a first experience of a few months: an internship is enough;
• you are changing career: some short routes, such as vocational titles or coding bootcamps, include an immersion phase in a company, with their own rules.

The skills expected of a beginner

Nobody expects an intern to master a whole technology stack. Recruiters look instead for solid foundations and a visible ability to learn.

The technical foundation

• one language mastered properly (JavaScript or TypeScript, Python, Java, C# or PHP depending on the company);
• the fundamentals of the web: HTML, CSS, HTTP requests, the idea of an API;
• relational databases and the SQL language;
• everyday use of Git: branches, readable commits, merges, resolving conflicts;
• a first approach to automated testing.

The human foundation

Knowing how to ask for help at the right moment, rephrase an instruction, flag a delay before it weighs on the team, and accept the comments of a review without bristling. These qualities often weigh as much as technique in the final decision.

A project to show: a few things, well explained

A short, documented and understandable repository is worth more than a large application whose choices you cannot justify. A young developer who presents three well-kept repositories convinces more than a profile full of copied tutorials.

For a project to help your application, check that it contains:

1. a readme file that explains the need, how to run the program and the technical choices;
2. a coherent commit history, showing progress rather than a single repository uploaded in one block;
3. a few tests, even modest ones, to prove that you care about reliability;
4. a difficulty you met and how you solved it, which you will tell in person.

A modest contribution to an open project, such as fixing a typo in documentation or a small reported defect, also shows that you can work in other people's code.

Where and how to look

The host environments are varied: software publishers, IT services companies, start-ups, web agencies, and the IT departments of banks, insurers, large industrial groups or local authorities. Each type of organisation offers a different kind of learning. An IT services company exposes you to several clients and technologies, a start-up gives you responsibility faster, and a large group offers a more formal working framework.

Several approaches can be combined:

• the internships office or the employer relations office of your school or university;
• job sites devoted to internships and apprenticeships, with alerts on your keywords;
• school and employer fairs and events organised by the digital sector;
• targeted unsolicited applications, addressed to a technical manager rather than a generic mailbox;
• your network: alumni of your course, guest speakers, people met at meetups.

For an apprenticeship, start early: the best offers are often filled several months before the start of the academic year.

Typical tasks in an internship or apprenticeship

The nature of the tasks depends on the organisation, but some come up often:

• fixing bugs described in a tracking tool;
• adding a page, a form, an API endpoint or a management screen;
• writing or completing automated tests;
• updating technical documentation and installation guides;
• taking part in team routines: the daily meeting, code review, a presentation at the end of a cycle;
• migrating a small part of an application to a newer version of a library.

Ask the question at the interview: which technology will you work on, who will validate your code, how are changes tested and then put online? A named technical contact changes the quality of an internship radically, because it stops you from being stuck alone for days.

Succeeding in the technical interview

The interview often takes place in two stages: a discussion of your background, then a technical conversation. This can take the form of questions about your project, a small exercise done live or a test to complete at home.

A few habits help:

• think out loud: the interviewer is judging your reasoning more than the perfection of the result;
• if you do not know, say so, then explain how you would look for the answer;
• reread your own project before the interview so you can justify every choice;
• prepare two or three questions about how the team works.

For a written application, the CV fits on one page: education, skills ranked by level, projects with a link to the repository, experience. The cover letter explains in a few lines why this company and this type of product interest you.

An illustrative example: three months to deliver a small feature

An illustration given as an example, with rounded and hypothetical figures. Let us imagine Ines, a third-year computing student, hosted for twelve weeks in the product team of a booking software publisher.

During the first two weeks, she sets up the environment, reads the code and fixes three small bugs with the help of her contact. Between the third and the eighth week, she is given an improvement: adding a date search filter to a list of bookings. She proposes a solution, receives around fifteen comments during the review, takes most of them on board and discusses two. In the following weeks, she writes the tests, updates the documentation and presents her work to the team in a demonstration.

In the end, Ines has not revolutionised the product. She has, however, delivered a feature that is really used, learned the full cycle of a change and obtained a precise recommendation. This is the kind of modest, verifiable result to aim for.

Common mistakes to avoid

Several slips come up among beginner candidates.

• Piling up technologies on the CV without being able to discuss them: better to list four well mastered than fifteen barely touched.
• Presenting a project copied from a tutorial as a personal creation; recruiters spot it quickly.
• Neglecting readability: obscure variable names, no useful comments, a repository with no explanation.
• Staying stuck in silence for days, instead of flagging the difficulty after a reasonable effort to find the answer.
• Ignoring basic security, for example leaving passwords in a public repository.
• Accepting an internship with no clear tasks or supervisor, where you are mostly given jobs unrelated to development.

Before signing, reread the tasks written in the agreement or the contract: they must match what you were told.