Published by the Qbizaa team
We run career, trainee and summer trainee programs at Qbizaa because we've seen firsthand how much faster someone grows when they're working on a real project instead of a tutorial. But an internship only pays off if you go into it with the right habits. Here's what we tell every new trainee who joins our team.
Ask "Why" Before You Ask "How"
It's easy to ask a senior developer how to fix a bug and move on. It's more valuable to ask why the bug happened in the first place. Understanding the reasoning behind a piece of code — why this framework, why this data structure, why this approach over another — is what turns a task you completed into a skill you keep.
Get Comfortable Reading Code Before Writing It
Most of a developer's time, on our team and everywhere else, goes into reading existing code, not writing new code from scratch. Trainees who spend their first weeks actually tracing through the codebase — following a request from the front end through the API to the database — ramp up noticeably faster than those who jump straight to writing features.
Treat Code Review as the Main Lesson, Not a Formality
Every comment on a pull request is feedback you'd otherwise have to learn the hard way, later, in production. We encourage trainees to ask follow-up questions on review comments instead of just making the requested change — that's usually where the real learning happens.
Own Small Things Completely
Early on, it's more useful to fully own a small feature — from requirements to testing to deployment — than to touch a dozen things partially. Seeing something through end to end teaches you the parts of the job that never show up in a course: estimating time, handling edge cases, and communicating status.
Show Up to Learn, Not Just to Finish Tasks
The trainees who get the most out of our programs, and who we're most likely to bring on permanently, are the ones who treat every task as a chance to understand the system better, not just something to check off. That mindset is the biggest predictor of growth we've seen, far more than which college or course someone came from.
Interested in joining our career or trainee program? Visit our Career section to learn more.