Introduction
This post is for Day 10 of Mercari Advent Calendar 2022, brought to you by Vaibhav Jain.
I joined Mercari Japan last year as a Software Engineer Intern and currently working as a Software Engineer at Mercari India. In this article, I will walk you through my transition from Intern at Japan Office to Full-time at India office. Also, I will be going through my journey so far at Mercari India. You can check out my Internship Experience here.
I had been through different phases in my journey with Mercari. Initially, I was interning at Mercari JP from August ’21 to December ’21, then I rejoined Mercari JP as a subcontractor from the month of April ’22 to July ’22. After that I joined Mercari India as a Full-time Software Engineer from August ’22. And the best and only constant part of all these phases was my team.
Transition Phase
Life is easier when you are an intern, but as you transition into a full-time employee, things start to get more serious. There is a big difference between being an Intern/Subcontractor and a Full-time employee. Let me take you through my transition phase.
Work
The first big change was the nature of my work. As an intern, mostly I worked on small tickets like bugs/minor improvements. I took some big tickets as well like the implementation of a local database in the Android application and working on the features related to the filters on the search screen.The workload was still low and got a lot of help from my mentor, Abhinav Joshi. He used to assign me the tickets, explain to me them in detail and also used to guide me on how/who to approach.
But once I transitioned to being a full-time employee, the amount of work increased. I started to take on more work, discussions withPM, engineering managers (EMs) and QAs. You can always ask for help but there is no spoon-feeding.
Performance Evaluation and OKRs
When you are an intern, you don’t have to worry about any OKRs or self assessment because there is none for interns. You can always ask for casual feedback from your Manager/Mentor but there is no performance evaluation for interns.
But as soon as you become a full-time employee, you have OKRs to work upon, you have to write a self-assessment after each quarter and you also have a performance evaluation semi-annually. For me, these were very helpful because they gave me a direction to work and now I could channel my energy & time in the right direction.
Relocation
I did my internship remotely from India so I was not able to experience the office culture.
When I joined Mercari India, I relocated to Bengaluru, India. It was the first time I worked from the office because all of my internships were during the COVID’19 period only. It was an amazing experience to work from the office, meeting new people and networking with them.
Overall, my transition experience was pretty smooth both in terms of work and place, all thanks to Mohan Bhatkar, Jatin Kumar, Mikako-san, Onboarding Team at Mercari India and my Manager. Also, big shoutout to my manager Stephan Donin. He made sure that my transition was a cakewalk.
Experience at Mercari India
In terms of work, I was still part of the same team as when I was an intern. Although there was not much difference, I was missing the in-person collaboration with my team.
The one thing I was missing during my internship was in-person lunches/dinners. Here we have a lot of team lunches/dinners with other members of Mercari India {add some photos}. I really enjoyed each one of them, interacting and networking with people from Tokyo Office as well.
I have been part of many different events that have happened in the Mercari India office.
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Golang Bangalore – Attended my first-ever in-person conference. It was a really nice experience getting acquainted with Go language. Also, after the talks, we had a networking session with all the attendees and it was very informative.
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Bangalore Visit – Anand (Backend Engineer), Kentan-san(Engineering Manager) and I visited various places in Bangalore including ISKCON Temple, Bangalore Palace, Cubbon Park and Vidhan Sabha (Parliament House). It was a really nice outing.
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Japan Day – We went to IIT Hyderabad for Japan Day 2022. It was a fabulous experience knowing and interacting with people from different Japanese companies and talking with students from IIT Hyderabad. We even had friendly badminton and table tennis matches with the IIT Hyderabad sports team.
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Mercari Hiring Drive – We had a hiring drive for new grads in Bangalore. It was also really fun interacting with students and sharing my internship experience.
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Furniture Shopping at IKEA – We also went to IKEA Bangalore for some furniture shopping for the India Office. It was my first time going to an IKEA.
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Diwali Celebration – Since Diwali is a very special and grand festival of India, we had to do something in the office as well. We had a Diwali Party in the office where we all were dressed in traditional attires. We played some games and had an amazing lunch (not the usual lunch).
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HackFest – We also celebrated Hackfest in the India Office, and some members from Mercari India also participated in Hackfest.
Conclusion
My internship experience was pretty amazing and I got to learn many new things as a person and a software engineer. It set a benchmark in my mind on what to expect as a full-time software engineer. After I got converted to a full-time engineer, the experience from the internship really helped me to get used to the new challenges. Currently, I am having a very good time at Mercari India. Lots of new experiences like meeting and networking with people from Mercari India and Mercari JP, having a lot of discussions at team dinners and exploring around Bangalore as well. The last 4 months have been amazing for me and I hope to have a good experience in the future as well !!
PS: I completed one year being a part of Mercari this November. Cheers!!
Tomorrow’s article, for the 11th day of Mercari Advent Calendar will be by rey. Please look forward to it!
