This is the fourth post in a series about how I earned my degree. The earlier posts are How I earned a computer science degree debt-free, with a job already in hand, How I earned a third of my degree by exam and portfolio, and How an unpaid apprenticeship launched my software career.
In July 2003 I started at SAS as a student intern. Eight months later, more than a year before I finished my degree, SAS hired me full time as a software developer. Here’s how that happened, what changed when it did, and what it was like to finish a degree while working full time.
Getting in the door
When my apprenticeship at RoleModel Software ended in March 2003, I spent the next few months job hunting. I sent more than 20 applications and had four phone interviews, three in-person interviews and one interview by email. In June 2003, SAS offered me a summer job as a “technical student” in its management information systems (MIS) department, SAS’s internal IT group, which wrote the software the company used to run its own business.
I heard about the job from my Dad, who worked at SAS. He managed a technical documentation team in a different department, in a different building, so he wasn’t anywhere near my work. Once I started, we sometimes drove in together or met for lunch in one of SAS’s cafeterias. It was never awkward.
A few days before I started, I wrote to one of my mentors from RoleModel that I seriously doubted I would have gotten the job without my eight months there. I still believe that. I was a college student with no degree yet, in a year when even new graduates were struggling to get hired.
What the internship was like
I started on July 1, 2003. I didn’t know exactly what I’d be doing, and the department was in the middle of a reorganization. I ended up sharing an office with an NC State student, writing code in the SAS language and in PHP.
My first assignments were small training projects in the SAS language. Then I moved to an internal web application that SAS’s sales and marketing groups in the US and Europe used to run mailing campaigns. Before long, people in the UK and Germany were emailing me directly about problems they’d found, and I was fixing them. It was real work, the same as at RoleModel.
SAS paid me by the hour as an intern, and the pay was a real step up from the apprenticeship. I got a couple of raises in that hourly rate while I was still an intern. SAS also ran a weekly lunch for its technical students, a good way to meet the other students working there.
The full-time offer
When I was hired, the manager who hired me said that summer interns usually stayed on until they graduated, but that SAS hired students full time only after they graduated. With the economy down, even that had become hard.
My manager by then was happy with my work, and she pushed for SAS to hire me full time anyway. On February 12, 2004, SAS offered me a full-time job. They asked me to promise that I would finish my degree and graduate. I promised, and I started full time in March 2004, as an applications developer.
The job was salaried, at a typical starting salary for a new developer at the time. A few weeks later the IT division’s newsletter announced that two of its interns had been hired full time, and I was one of them. One of the other students called it “a major accomplishment in the midst of a national economic nose dive.” My Dad teased me about being in the newsletter.
A big company after a small studio
The biggest adjustment wasn’t the work. It was how the work was done.
At RoleModel the team was small, we moved quickly, and we got code into users’ hands fast. SAS used traditional waterfall development, with project managers and plenty of meetings. Things moved more slowly, and change wasn’t easy. People had established ways of running projects.
I brought my habits from RoleModel with me anyway. I wrote tests for much of the code I wrote at SAS. I encouraged pair programming and some of the other Extreme Programming practices on my team, with limited success. I also introduced a little Ruby into a world that was mostly Java and similar languages. For much of that time I was moving that campaign application from PHP to Java.
When I was promoted to Applications Developer 2 in April 2005, my manager’s announcement mentioned that my teammates had benefited from the mentoring I gave them on newer technologies. I’d learned at RoleModel that sharing what you know is part of the job.
Finishing the degree while working full time
For my last year and a half of college, I worked full days at SAS and studied in the evenings and on weekends. I passed exams, finished courses and wrote portfolios for Thomas Edison State College. Two of my portfolios drew on my work at SAS. (I’ve written about how I earned a third of my degree by exam and portfolio.)
The schedule helped. SAS offered a 35-hour week, I could be in by 8:30 and out by 4:30, and the commute was about 30 minutes, half of what I’d driven to RoleModel. That left my evenings for school. As far as I remember, SAS didn’t help with tuition.
I kept my promise. Thomas Edison conferred my BA in Computer Science in September 2005, five months after the promotion. Nobody at SAS ever asked about my grades. (I explain why that didn’t surprise me in Why It Doesn’t Pay to Get Straight A’s in College.)
Moving on
In June 2005 I went to No Fluff Just Stuff, a developer conference in Research Triangle Park, and came home excited about two things: Ruby, and working for myself. Many of the talks were on Ruby and other technologies I couldn’t use day to day at SAS, and I saw Ruby on Rails for the first time, in a talk by Dave Thomas, one of the Pragmatic Programmers. We’d been building web applications at SAS with a Java framework called Struts, and Rails made that look painful. Most of the speakers were independent consultants, too, and for the first time I started to picture doing that kind of work myself.
I also met Jared Richardson, one of the speakers, and found out he worked at SAS. That September I transferred to his team in SAS’s research and development division. It didn’t turn out to be the job I’d hoped for, and in July 2006, after three years at SAS, I left to try independent software consulting. I started my own company, Adeptware. It didn’t start smoothly: the first project I’d lined up was canceled in my second week. But I’ve been running it ever since.
What made the difference
Looking back, three things turned a summer internship into a full-time job more than a year before I graduated:
- Experience before the internship. The apprenticeship gave me real work to point to when I applied, and habits like testing that made my work at SAS better.
- Doing the internship like a job. I took on real work for real users, and I tried to make my team better, not just finish my assignments.
- A manager in my corner. My manager pushed to hire me before I graduated. You can’t control that, but you can give a manager reasons to go to bat for you.
If you’re studying by distance, an internship is a great fit. With no class timetable, you can work a full day and study at night, as I did. Look for a paid internship in your field, treat it like a real job, and keep your school plans on track. The degree still matters, even after you’re hired; SAS asked me to promise I’d finish mine.
I’ve written more about internships, paid and unpaid, in Think Before You Intern. In the next post in this series, I’ll tell the story of that conference, the transfer, and how they led me to leave SAS and go out on my own.
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