I’m Miska, and I’m (soon to be) a Computer Science bachelor from Aalto University. In the spring of 2021 I was furiously searching for a job relating, in any way really, to computer science as I hadn’t worked in the field before and I was really keen to finally gain some real knowledge instead of just Youtube tutorials. I had never even heard of Hoxhunt at this point which, in retrospect, is pretty weird as I had been quite alert to what different companies there are in our field. One evening I noticed the LinkedIn listing for the Summer Hunter program and my first thought was “This looks like some strange pöhinä scam”. I still decided to read up more on it and Hoxhunt in general and eventually thought I’d give it a shot as it seemed pretty cool. The nice looking Summer Hunter page definitely helped in changing my mind :D
I like to keep my “career” goals quite general. This way I can maintain optionality and freedom on doing what I want to do, be it in the field of computer science or, say, botany. I’d say I’m a value creator. I don’t really care if it’s monetary value or visible value that is in question but doing meaningful things appeals to me like nothing else. Hoxhunt is brilliant for this because we’re focused on fixing a very real and continuously evolving problem in cybersecurity. Hoxhunt is also a very progressive company in the sense that both the tooling we use and the work practices we maintain are regularly looked at with an air of critique instead of falling blindly into old habits. These combined make it a very good place to learn real-life problem solving.
As a computer science student, I had some previous knowledge on all of these. Not very much though. And the knowledge I had was quite theoretical as I had no work experience on any of these. So far that hasn’t had much impact at all on my experience here. Of course the impostor syndrome kicks in every now and then but that’s quite expected and seeing people more senior than me also suffering from it helps to put things into perspective. What I’d say matters more than knowledge/experience on these topics is a genuine interest in them and a willingness to both learn more and relearn some of the things that you thought you knew.
I definitely did. Not to sound like too much of a kiss-ass but in the summer I had a surreal feeling of embodying the exact desire for learning that had consumed me during my spring of job searching. It was a strange feeling of validation. It made me realise that it was more than worth it to put in the work during my job search.
The people are amazing. None of these previously mentioned good things would exist without the atmosphere that the hoxhunters create. Generally, it feels like people recognise that we’re all individual humans and not some sort of hive mind trying to create software and sell it. Everything is dealt with in a casual, yet effective way. It really gives off the feeling that the people actually want to solve the problems we’ve set out to solve and not “just work here”.
I’ve gotta mention Sense here. It was the project we set out to do during the summer with the other Summer Hunters and a few other hoxhunters. The approach to create a new product in the summer was very unexpected for me but I really enjoyed it. Suddenly I had quite a lot of say into what a product would look like and how it would function. Of course there was always the understanding that this is something created in large part by interns so we weren’t overwhelmed with responsibility for it. But it did certainly scratch my itch for value creation in a big way. I’d say as quite a visual person it was (and still is!) especially great to get to put extra effort into making things look good.
I can’t speak much on behalf of the people outside of tech so I’ll take the developer angle here. I’d say Hoxhunt is a great fit especially for people who enjoy web development but would like to do it for the sake of something else than just web development. The problem set we’re working with is very large so even though it’s not, for example, a consultancy you get to work on a large scale of different problems.
