Back in April, we welcomed our first cohort of incident.io interns. Christin Yuniar Wulandari, Lucas Graeff Buhl-Nielsen and Gabriel de Olim Gaul spent 5 months in our Engineering team, they are now getting ready to depart and finish their final year at university.
We sat down with them to find out things like what they learned throughout their internship, what it’s like at incident.io, and what skills they will take with them into the future.
Q: What has it been like as the first group of interns at incident.io?
Christin: Honestly, it has been really really fun. I think a huge part of that is because we are not treated like interns, we are treated as part of the team. You're really trusted to run your own project as well.
Lucas: incident.io is a startup, it's quite unusual to find internships at startups. Most of the older students at my university did their internships at much bigger companies, so the experiences they shared were really different. When I applied for the internship here I was told we were going to be treated like any other engineer. I half believed that, but how true that is–it’s amazing and special to be treated that way by the team.
Gabriel: It's been great, everyone's been really supportive. Everyone's been very excited to have the first group of interns, it feels special. To be honest, we don't really feel like interns because we're trusted to own our own projects and features. I don't really think of myself as an intern, more like an actual team member.
Q: What is your favorite incident.io memory?
Christin: The off-site to Marseille. We got to see the beautiful South of France and enjoy nature whilst on a beach hike, which was really fun!
Lucas: Aside from the week long offsite to Marseille, the week where I shadowed on-call overnight with Lawrence Jones [incident.io Product Engineer]. I got paged and Lawrence quite calmly told me, “Lucas, please could you change this from a minor to a major incident”, and that's when I kind of s*** my pants.
Gabriel: The off-site, it was a really great experience as I've never been to France before. We did a lot of cool things, but the highlight was the hike followed by swim: really nice weather, really beautiful scenery and then the swim after was the icing on the cake.
Q: If you could swap roles with anyone at incident.io for a day, who would it be and why?
Christin: I think it would have to be Charlie Kingston, our Product Manager. He makes such great product spec and is also really customer driven. All the customers must love him and I know all the engineers love him as well.
Lucas: I would like to swap with a member of the Sales team. I think it would be really interesting from having experience building the product to then working in Sales trying to sell the product to another company.
Gabriel: I’d swap with a Product Manager, to be able to talk to customers and figure out what people's pain points are and assess or create solutions.
Q: Which value do you most resonate with and why?
Christin: Find a way. I find satisfaction in delivering something or making something work and the fact that the team is always by your side to help you get there is really awesome.
Lucas: Raise the Pace. The entire time I've been here everything has been about building things as quickly as we can and I think we've done a really good job at that.
Gabriel: Trust by Default. When I first started working here it was daunting to be instantly trusted to do things–elsewhere you wouldn't be able to do straight away.
Q: What is the most exciting project you worked on?
Christin: It would have to be part of Catalog bootstrapping, which involves setting the customer up to Catalog faster and using AI to suggest attribute values.
Lucas: It has to be smart escalation paths. It involves letting people route escalations to different people depending on the level of priority and what time of the day it is. It was a really interesting problem, lots of our customers loved the outcome and it was really satisfying.
Gabriel: One of the more recent ones, Kanban. I worked on this with Isaac [incident.io Product Engineer] and Gabriel [incident.io Product Designer], and in just one week we upgraded our incidents page and added the Kanban view so you’re able to see incidents in each status. The feedback we received from this was insanely good and really uplifting. A lot of customers didn't even know they needed it, but found the update really useful. Seeing the impact felt really nice.
Q: What areas do you think you've leveled up in during your internship?
Christin: As an intern it doesn't mean I don't or can’t have an opinion on things we are working on. From day one, we were treated as engineers and that's been something really exciting that I've built into like my stride.
Lucas: I've really learned how to plan and organize projects. Quite often we start with ideas for features, where we have to go and scope them out. This involves what we want the product to look like at the end and how we're going to implement that technically, which is something I've never done before at university. Learning how to allocate engineering resources and time to that has been really cool.
Gabriel: I've really leveled up in a bunch of areas, and I've gotten used to working at this crazy fast pace, which is awesome. I'm far more confident in sharing my thoughts and ideas, even if they might sound a bit out there.
Q: Who have you most enjoyed working/partnering with during your time here?
Christin: I have really enjoyed working with Pip Taylor [incident.io Product Engineer] from our Foundations Team–whenever he explains things, he will pull out an A3 piece of paper, a sharpie, and he will walk you through it.
Lucas: Not Lawrence! No, that's a joke. I can't really answer who I've most enjoyed working with, because my entire team is just so awesome.
Gabriel: I can’t really pick a single person. I've worked with a lot of people at incident.io, especially in the PINC team, like [incident.io Product Engineers] Isaac Seymour, Milly Leadley, and Aaron Sheah. They're very supportive, incredibly helpful, and have given me a lot of advice.
Q: What is something unique about working at incident.io?
Christin: Definitely how customer driven the team is–that's why the engineers are called Product Engineers. Also, how we have a low barrier of creating incidents and treating them really seriously.
Lucas: As an intern, it’s the amount of responsibility you're given. In the second week, we were given access to production. We'd already been shipping code to production from day one, but we're also given the responsibility to lead projects and to contribute to the direction of the product. I haven’t heard that from other people's experiences.
Gabriel: How friendly everyone is. You step into the office and you'll hear people laughing straight away and everyone seems really happy to work here, which I feel like you don't see in a lot of places. It doesn't feel like you're working with colleagues–it feels like you're working with friends who all have the same goal of making customers happy.
Q: What is one word you would use to describe your time at incident.io?
Christin: Cracked.
Lucas: Surprising.
Gabriel: Exciting.
Q: What are you going to miss about incident.io?
Christin: Definitely the amount of laughing that you can hear in the office.
Lucas: Working with everyone, everyone is always down for a laugh, everyone is super smart and I’ve made a lot of good friends.
Gabriel: The people. To be all heartfelt and stuff, the people are what makes this place really great; without the people, incident.io wouldn't be the company it is. Everyone's very mindful about what they work on, supporting others and not just people in their team: for example, Engineers helping Sales, sales helping Customer Success, and so on. It's just really great to see the company work as a whole.
Q: What learnings will you take with you into your final year at university?
Christin: Be very mindful of how you use your time. At incident.io we really crave that magic moment, and only from being mindful of your time and what you do with it can you get those magic moments.
Lucas: How to move really, really fast, and get 90% of value out of 20% of the work.
Gabriel: Getting stuck in, don’t be afraid to mess things up, get context from others to allow you to work quickly. This is something that I’ll apply to my field of study and future jobs.
Q: What is a valuable lesson that will benefit you in your future career?
Christin: Being mindful about having an opinion and not following things blindly, I think that's the way you can contribute more to a team.
Lucas: Learning how to decide what's the most valuable thing you can ship to a customer, why, and then getting it out as quickly as you can.
Gabriel: Not being afraid to ask questions. There were a lot of occasions during the start of this internship where I would stay quiet and not ask anything, which really isn’t useful because then you end up with unanswered questions!
Q: What advice would you give to future interns?
Christin: If you're curious about anything at all, ask! You're at the best place, surrounded by people who are happy to help you.
Lucas: Spend a lot of time learning about the products and giving a lot of attention to that, even sometimes going over the technical details. Being able to understand the product and how your customers use the product is the most important thing to determine how to provide the most value to the customers.
Gabriel: Don't be afraid to get stuck in. Try to understand how everything works and ask as many questions as possible. There's not a question too small that you shouldn't ask, even if it's a small doubt in your mind. Everyone's going to be willing to answer those questions and it's really useful especially when starting out somewhere new.
