System Programmer Intern (DOTAX)
During the summer of my senior year of college, and into my last semester, I interned at the Hawaii Department of Taxation. This was my first time working in an office setting, and my first time working with so many other developers. In my previous job I worked completely remotely and was one of only two developers (or the only developer), so this was a great learning experience. The team consisted of around 10 Hawaiʻi government employees and around 10 contracted employees from FAST Enterprises.
The Work
I can’t talk specifics on what we did exactly due to the sensitive nature of the work, but I can say we all did approximately the same sort of thing. We all maintained, fixed, updated, and added to the internal GenTax website used by DOTAX employees and the public HITAX website, as well as some internal tools used by the employees. I would usually be assigned a task like a change or bug fix, and I would do “research” on the site in order to understand the system that the change or fix is a part of. For example if the task involved a certain tax form I would probably want to look into what type of taxpayer files that form. After making the changes for the task, we had to do extensive testing on the changes we made. Making sure the system works as it should and as expected was very important at this job, as you can probably imagine.
Something I had to learn at this job was how to ask the more senior developers questions to help me out. When I started here I would spend a lot of time trying to figure things out alone as that is what I had to do at my previous job. But I learned that senior developers are a great resource to save time and learn things faster. When I would get a task that involved a subsystem I was unfamiliar with, I would find out which developer was the most knowledgable about the system and ask them a question. This would usually be enough to set me on the right path, given that the question I asked was specific enough. This process helped me a lot in finishing tasks in a shorter amount of time as it helped get me unstuck, and helped me learn more, faster.
2022 Year-End Changes
For my last two months of work at this internship the team was mainly focused on the 2022 YEC (Year-End Changes) project. This is an annual update to most of the tax forms that people file as well as a time for lots of changes to be pushed all at once. As a result, there was a lot of testing to be done, multiple passes of end-to-end testing of all the different subsystems of the sites. I would spend some days just running through testing scenarios, making sure the sites works as intended in many different use cases. We also had more meetings than usual, mostly for checking-in on tasks and making sure everyone is on the same page for prioritization.
Conclusion
This was a very valuable experience for me, and like I said, I learned a lot about working in a larger team of developers. Learning to communicate with and ask questions of other developers is a very valuable skill that I think this job helped me hone. I’m glad to have had the experience working here, as the skills I learned at this job will be put to good use in all my roles moving forward.
See the main Hawaii Tax website