Consumed

• 79 albums
• 65 (unique) restaurants
• 64 films
• 36 TV series
• 30 books
• 21 concerts
• 5 video games
• 4 plays
• 2 podcast series
• 3 talks
• 2 art exhibitions
• 2 “proper” comedy gigs
• 1 comedy special

Created

• 543 morning pages
• 10 songs worked on
• 11 stand up performances
• 7 compering performances
• 4 comedy nights teched
• 4 new bakes
• 43 signature brownies
• 32 signature blondies
• 2 music hack day projects (Curlew, Nightowl)

Achieved

• 2 promotions
• 112km over 30 runs
• ~100 games of squash
  • ~100 victories at squash (sorry, Zac)
• 1 outdoor swim
• 1 game of tennis
• ~72 games of Dominion Online
• 1 new regular comedy night (Magpie)
• 1 award (Best White Boy Comedian Named Sam)
• 1 booster jab

It was incredibly difficult narrowing this down to a top 10, but the medium of Instagram and the modern condition of constant ranking and comparison insists. So here we are. They are honestly in no particular order. I’ve cheated at least twice. There will probably be some honourable mentions later on. I cannot claim to be a food critic. I cannot tell you these are the 10 best restaurants you could go to in this city (although sometimes I will do so anyway). I truly believe that you cannot separate the context of experiencing something from the thing itself - the time, the place, the weather, the mood, or perhaps most importantly the people you’re with - these all have as much impact on your enjoyment of the food itself. These are merely the ten that stand out to me as some of my favourite restaurant experiences this year, for any and all of those factors.

Flour House

I first went to Flour House on the second day it was open, if only because I’d been asked to provide a vicarious experience, and honestly I don’t think a week has gone by since when I haven’t been back. It is without a doubt my new favourite place to sit in Bristol. I have brought almost everyone I know who likes food here for brunch or coffee or something at this point. I’m writing this entry sat there right now. Spotlighted here is one of the recent lunch options, a Teriyaki salmon with wild brown rice, sesame cooked tenderstem, and avocado. It is delicious, but so is - and I cannot stress this enough - everything I’ve ever had here. Every cake, brownie, brunch, sandwich, mince pie, milkshake, everything. It’s the friendliest place you can find (where else would give you a little house plant as a thank you for being a regular?), and I’m even starting a stand up gig here in February. I almost don’t want you to go to Flour House, so I can keep it to myself. But that wouldn’t be fair. You’d be missing out.

BOX-E

Obviously BOX-E is on this list. I’ve been five or six times this year. Of course I have. I tell everyone to go, and often they listen. I have many happy memories of my times at BOX-E this year, from an exceptional New Year’s Eve lunch only yesterday, to a Riesling tasting evening on the terrace (Tess and I sharing a fondness for the grape); from hungover lunches with Zac (I blame the interns you’ll meet below) to birthday lunches where god love them they managed to get a birthday candle to stay upright in a bowl of rice pudding. But my favourite memory of it from this year is my first trip back this year, and one of my first restaurant visits of the year, all the way in May. Out on a not too chilly terrace, just remembering the experience of eating delicious food in a proper setting, with much wine - there is no other place I’d rather have done it. These are some scallops, with crispy fried leeks, from that visit.

Adelina Yard

I went on a bit of a mission this year to expand the number of places I’ve eaten in Bristol, with obviously a preference for the nicer places - it’s not that I’m a food snob, lord knows that I’m partial to a cheap pizza or a takeaway, perhaps too partial, but a few years ago I realised how much I enjoyed good food, and here we are. Adelina Yard had long been on my list of places to try, and sometimes in the summer you just need an excuse to take an afternoon off work and treat yourself. An excitingly varied tasting menu with impeccably matched wines, including a lovely additional set of snacks and petit fours afterwards. I told my current manager to go here for her anniversary (or her husband’s birthday, one of the two), and I think that worked.

Bulrush

There are three Michelin starred restaurants in Bristol. Bulrush was the first one I made it to, all the way back in the heady days of 2019. Since then, I’ve been to all three, but we’ll get back to that later. Bulrush was a restaurant I worried a lot about (comparatively speaking) during lockdown - how does a restaurant with only a 10 course tasting menu survive that? I was scared to Google it to find out, dreading the worst. But sat in BOX-E in that first trip back, I plucked up the courage and was delighted to see it was still going. I immediately booked it. One hasty last minute rearrangement such that I could go to a barbecue at my boss’s place near the Forest of Dean later, there I was again, this time sat in the cosy upstairs area. A fascinating set of flavour combinations (spruce ice cream, who knew?), all very well matched. A treat, for sure.

Paco Tapas

There are three Michelin starred restaurants in Bristol. Paco Tapas was the last one I made it to. (The missing one, in the middle, is Casamia, a definite highlight of 2020 but that is sadly out of scope for this discussion). Another sunny afternoon off work in the summer, with nothing to do. In contrast to most of the previous entries, Paco Tapas doesn’t really offer a tasting menu by default, so it was up to us to decide what we wanted to order. The only sensible option was to merely order pretty much everything on the menu and hope for the best. Plus some cocktails. Then some wine. Then some (duh) Pedro Ximinez. I still think about the tuna I had here, very often.

Pasta Loco/Pasta Ripiena/Bianchis/Pizza Bianchis

I grant you that I’m cheating here, but otherwise the Bianchi Group restaurants would have taken up four spots on this list and that just didn’t seem fair. But I cannot separate them. Let’s not spend time counting how many times I went to these collectively this year. Let us instead simply bask in the sumptuous glory of pasta and other Italian cuisines. From the infamous carbonara at Loco to the focaccia graciously received at the end of a meal at Ripiena to mop up the sauce; from chicken milanese to some of the best pizza (and, I would add, some of the best chocolate milkshakes) in Bristol. The arancini at all of them. And the fact that I’m apparently enough of a regular to warrant a glass of fizz when I turn up. A Bristol staple that I was delighted to keep in my calendar regularly this year.

The Hobgoblin

The Hobgoblin does the best burgers in Bristol. I will not be accepting counterarguments on this. I assure you I have done the research. Don’t at me. I hadn’t been since before lockdown in March 2020. I was worried it wouldn’t be the same. But in October, for one of my many food-related birthday celebrations, I took all of my interns out for burgers there and god was I glad to not be wrong. This was the first time I think I’d seen all of them in person at once. I’d made my signature chocolate cake for the occasion, and they surprised me with a very sweet present. The rest of the evening was spent drinking copious amounts and boy did I feel it the next day. But it was 100% worth it, and would have been 100% worse without a Hobgoblin cheeseburger in me to start with.

The Pony

There was lots of other food around my birthday (Six By Nico with Alex and Andy, Clifton Sausage for a CDS mentoring dinner, Ahh Toots for afternoon tea with Soph, the aforementioned BOX-E birthday lunch), but this was the day itself (although even then I made it to Flour House for brunch with Thomas too). Having no means of ever getting to the original Pony And Trap in Chew Magna, the team opening a bistro in Bedminster made my life much easier. This was absolutely a birthday meal to remember, dutifully joined by Ben. Milk Stout tiramisu, a beautiful piece of Cull Yaw, and rainbow trout. Very nice wine. And a nice early evening of it too. 28 years old.

Root

I’m not much of a sharer, when it comes to food, as Soph disastrously found out when we ordered a Chinese takeaway about three weeks before I moved in with her. That was difficult. But times have changed, even when you’d assume Covid would have pushed me further towards keeping to myself. Phoebe came down to visit for the first time in lord knows how long, and what an excuse to try Root, yet another restaurant in the Cargo shipping containers. Following the Paco Tapas vibe, we ordered pretty much most of the menu and hoped for the best. We were not wrong. Predominantly vegetarian or fish-based dishes, this very much demonstrates that meat (delicious though it is) is never a requirement for excellent dining. Eat everything and avoid disappointment.

Breaking Bread/Home Grown

I went to Breaking Bread in a few different guises this year (from a non-culinary point of view, I also went to perform at the comedy night a few times, which was always a lot of fun, not least in that they also gave us food). There was my first restaurant trip back of the year, a Sunday roast at the Pipe and Lovers section which was delicious if not in my emotionally best place (thank god for red wine); there was a further trip to Pipe And Lovers with Zac and Martha, to enjoy a burger (not as good as The Hobgoblin, but you knew that, it was unfair to expect it); and finally a trip with Maddie and Chris to Home Grown, the fancier element of the whole affair. I’ve never eaten tomatoes as nice. And that’s saying something. I don’t know whether it will be back next year, but I hope it outlives Covid - a food tent on the Downs feels right for Bristol.

For Bo Burnham, as Inside puts it, those two things are one and the same. The conceit of Inside is simple: at the beginning of lockdown, Burnham locked himself in a room. In this room, he would write, direct, shoot, and edit a new stand up special - his first in 5 years - by himself.

The rest of this is quite spoiler heavy for Inside, and Burnham’s previous specials Make Happy and what., so maybe watch it/them first?

The results are immensely impressive on many levels. Comedically and musically, Burnham hasn’t been resting on his laurels for the last few years. The lyrics are sharper, the music more developed than ever. From a directorial point of view, he very quickly establishes a unique visual identity to the special. The colours are vivid, the improvised lighting - a highlight being millennial life crisis song 30 - a natural evolution of his knack for staging in previous specials, more expansive through its conceptual limitations.

Like lockdown itself, as Inside goes on, the novelty wears thin, the ceaselessness drags on, and the reality of being left alone with your thoughts and not liking what you find sets in. Burnham uses it to address, in different ways, the effects of derealisation, depression, and what happens when the thing that you’ve always used to help fix that is only making things worse. I’m not going to make some grand claim as to Burnham reinventing the stand-up special. But I think both Burnham himself and Inside as - yes, I’ll say it - a piece of art have a lot to explore. I have some thoughts. Here they are.

In 2016, when he released his previous special Make Happy, I compared Bo Burnham to a millennial Stewart Lee. The thing that really stands out is the bubbling over subtext of the importance of the gap between performance and authenticity, expressed through a simmering contempt for the audience. In Make Happy, Burnham repeatedly berates the audience for their reactions - laughing when something shouldn’t be laughed at, shouting “I love you”, participating in general. The audience are an unfortunate but necessary evil in the realisation of Burnham’s comedy. As the special goes on, this tension resolves itself in a confession that it’s his desire and need to please the audience that’s behind it.

In Inside, of course, there is no audience. One of Inside’s great triumphs is in how Burnham still manages to create, needle, play with, and - to an extent - defuse this tension regardless of its seemingly hermetically sealed confines. There are obvious elements: in Comedy and All Eyes On Me, the second and second last songs of the special respectively, Burnham plays in canned audience laughter after ambiguously unfunny statements, which is pretty reflective of how real audiences react when they’re not sure how serious the performer is being.

Between the songs and sketches, there are ostensibly candid moments - lighting tests, pre-take shots, mistakes - designed to demonstrate the artifice of the performances. But this is merely a meta-artifice. That’s not to say these aren’t candid, or real, but to point out that these are deliberately included to bed in the premise of being stuck in the room. Of course it’s a premise. The man’s rich, with a big house and a long-term partner. He was not falling apart in a boxy room for a year. But we want, on some level, to believe he was. And so we, the audience, want to make sure he’s ok. And perhaps the most daring part of Inside is that he does not give us this. Make Happy, following the climactic Kanye rant addressing the state of his mental health and his relationship with the audience, ends with a stripped back song in which Burnham asks the audience - and, implicitly, himself - are you happy? In the final seconds, though, he pulls back the curtain; he emerges from his room (the very same one in which he’s stuck in Inside) into the sunlight; smiling, embracing his partner, and cuddling his dog. This is the reassurance to the audience - this was an act. This is the real me. I’m fine.

Inside distinctly does not offer the audience this relief. Sure, it teases it. The door cracks open, the light pours in. Burnham emerges. All seems well, until the camera pulls back and the audience laughs. Burnham is still on stage, performing, and afraid of what this means, tries and fails to return to his room. It ends as it ever was, refusing to acknowledge the distinction, as Stewart Lee would put it, between the person Bo Burnham and the comedian Bo Burnham. The question Inside asks is, at what point - if any - do you key the audience into the pretence? Few other art forms suffer from this. A director is not expected to include a post-credit scene addressing the camera to tell the audience that they’re fine. Autofictional novels do not require a postscript clearing up the idea that the author may be exaggerating. But in stand up, where there is some level of shared buy in from the audience that they are seeing a real person be real with them, this feels… iffier. To break character is to shatter the illusion, but when the illusion is of a man suffering from genuine, serious mental health issues and - throughout the special - suicidal ideation, is it fair to the audience to not shatter it?

A tangent:

Bo Burnham is no stranger to the internet; he was birthed by it, playing silly songs on YouTube being the way he first shot to fame. He is no stranger to commenting on the impact the internet has on us as people: Eighth Grade, his directorial debut, portrays with distressing precision what an adolescence warped by social media looks like, the numbness of scrolling and double tapping, the knowledge that your life is not as perfect as you pretend it is on Instagram but the inability to believe that of anyone else. But here, in Welcome To The Internet, he addresses it head on. A devastating dissection of how easily the worst possible things - prejudice, dead children, sexual harassment, the incel movement, conspiracy theories - coexist with the shiny happy fun friendly recipes and Buzzfeed personality quizzes; of how the constant design decisions of social networks to encourage engagement at all costs are fundamentally breaking us as people; of how we’re now at the point where this is no longer happening to grown adults, but teenagers, but two year olds. It culminates in its chorus, of “could I interest you in everything, all of the time?”. Because that’s the promise of the internet. And how could having access to everything all of the time ever be a bad thing? Of course, maybe we’re not built to be able to handle having everything all of the time.

Consciously or unconsciously, this chorus echoes the work of another artist in some way obsessed with doomsaying of the intertwining of technology and society. In 2000 - before Instagram, and Facebook, and Twitter, when the internet was in its nascency but the seeds for good and ill were there if you were looking hard enough - Radiohead released Kid A, an album that crystallised Thom Yorke’s millennial (in its literal sense) crisis. At its heart is the frantic jittering of Idioteque, with a plaintive Yorke proclaiming in its chorus “here I’m allowed everything all of the time” - with an unnerving implication that this is not a good thing ¹. Thom Yorke was not singing about the same internet that Bo Burnham sings about now. As Burnham puts it, back then, “circa ‘99, it was catalogues, travel blogs, a chat room or two”. But Yorke and Radiohead engaged with the internet on its level at the time, understood its potential, and 20 years later that promise has been fulfilled.

Some partially rhetorical questions, to make some of the subtext of this piece text: is Inside funny? Is Inside comedy? Given the answer to those questions, does comedy have to be funny?

Inside is funny. Or at least, it starts off funny. As the special goes on, the non-song sketches drop off, the non-musical interludes become increasingly distressing, and the songs get more - to use an appropriately internet adjective - “real”. That Funny Feeling would not be out of place as the last track of a Father John Misty album, played completely straight. All Eyes On Me straight up discusses the increasingly severe panic attacks Burnham was having on stage which caused him to quite live performances for five years. Aggression seeps into the mix, towards his audience, his situation, himself. At one point, he tells the camera “I am not well” and breaks into tears.

This is not “velcro - what a rip off!” comedy ². But it would be wrong to dismiss this as not comedy. One of comedy’s great strengths is the ability to in some way express difficult things in a more palatable manner. At its best, by picking apart the silliness of our lives, it tells us something about ourselves. But it’s a tricky balancing act³. Some commentators have seen fit to instead describe this as a one man show, or performance art. To describe it as the latter is to by implication dismiss stand up comedy as not being art in itself. You couldn’t be more wrong.

Another tangent:

The construction of Inside is fascinating. By virtue of the premise, it takes place over lockdown. This is represented visually by Burnham’s increasingly long and dishevelled hair and unkempt facial hair, which offers its own logistical and creative constraints - namely, he has to some extent had to commit to each section of the special as it happened. There are no obvious jumps back and forth, of Burnham with thick beard in one scene, clean shaven the next, then back to thick beard. The illusion, at any rate, of the continuous passage of time is presented.

So how was this constructed? Was the progression from lighter hearted songs to full on breakdown a happy accident, or was it sketched out from the start? As a narrative goes, it’s both very compelling and entirely in line with how Burnham thinks. But either way, in the details, any idea that he had once the project began had to work in tandem with what’s been filmed so far - there’s no chance to rewrite, say, White Woman’s Instagram to add something in to make a callback to later on. It’s a solo game of exquisite corpse, with no undo button.

The closest insight that the special itself offers us is in its introduction to the closing song Goodbye - a camera test video of a younger, clean shaven Burnham playing “possible ending song” gives way via superimposition to the end-of-lockdown Burnham playing it properly. Who knows how it evolved from the original idea in that time. Maybe it’s unrecognisable. Maybe everything was there from the start. The question is, does the reality of either of those options make the end product any less impressive?

The very end of Bo Burnham’s 2013 special “what.” is Burnham earnestly playing air guitar, with the energy of a teenage boy alone in his bedroom. It is not played for laughs. It’s the most vital moment of the special and a surprisingly vulnerable one at that. It is the act of a comedian who has earned over the preceding hour the right to be earnest by connecting with the audience through laughter. It is the person Bo Burnham talking through the comedian Bo Burnham. Inside in some way flips this on its head, using the personal to tell the construct rather than using the construct to tell the personal.

So after all that, what is the construct? It is, I suppose, an acknowledgement that, yes, it’s been a strange year. A year in which police brutality and systemic racism saw the privileged making baby steps in understanding their place in this (How The World Works); a year in which dirty clothes piled up and showers went unused (Shit); a year in which people have grappled more with their past behaviour and what that makes them now (Problematic); and how being locked inside doesn’t stop any of that from getting in. When we’re no longer inside, who will we be when we come out the other side?

American exceptionalism is a heady drug. The potent combination of the arrogance of youth and the possibility of a brave new world, forged in the fire of a violent emancipation of its mother country. A belief that by sheer nature, America can do no wrong; that by virtue of the fact that it is doing it, it is the right thing to do. A worldview that permeates to this day, one which holds self-evident that not only can America do anything, should she put her mind to it, but that she will unquestionably do it better than anyone else ever could, or will, against all better judgement.

Thus, the Twinkie. Stuffed so full of preservatives that it is oft compared to cockroaches in its ability to withstand the harrowing effects of nuclear apocalypse, albeit with slightly less nutritional value. Nonetheless, the box bears an “best before” date - it should be noted, though, that “best before” implies a relative position of quality, not an absolute, and it is right not to do so. The box also notes that its colourants “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children”, posing the question how, given how unappealing the colour of the cake is as it stands, bad it must be unadulterated to warrant such side effects. It also recommends keeping the product away from direct sunlight, presumably lest it mutate.

Said product is described as a “golden sponge cake with creamy filling”, presumably by a man who has once perhaps seen a film in which characters have enjoyed cream, but due to an unfortunate dietary condition, has neither tasted, seen, or been in the presence of the genuine article. Somehow both oily and gelatinous, this filling does however maintain the remarkable quality of being entirely unable to soak, seep, or otherwise damage the integrity of the substance here being generously described as sponge. This substance miraculously combines the facets of tasting of nothing very much at all, still being immensely sickly, and independently of the filling sticking to one’s palate. Were a Twinkie to be a wine, its scores on mouth feel would be underwhelming at best.

As far as closing remarks go, I will note that its mascot is named Twinkie The Kid, which I’m sure has led to some unfortunate Google Image search results. The slight amusement of that mental image aside, there is very little to recommend here. The imagery on the back of the packaging reveals a number of related products that Hostess manufactures (for that must be the apt term), all seemingly equally made of their concepts of sponge and cream. This should not be questioned. These cakes will outlive us, and we’ll just have to make our peace with that.

All of these sofa shops (and, grudgingly, libraries) exist in harmony on one street in Bristol. I have so many questions. How are there enough people buying sofas on a regular cadence that even one of these shops can survive, let alone all of them? Who are these people? How do you even begin to decide which sofa shop (library) to purchase your sofa from?

How do you decide what TV series to binge, when there are so many to watch? Which albums to listen to, books to read, games to play? How do you decide what to write when there are so many things to write about, that you don’t even know where to start with any of them?

I guess you just write the first thing you can.

*

Assume they’re not paying close attention

Because, in the nicest way, they’re probably not. And that’s fine! I only have to worry about my own stuff (not strictly true, lord knows I spend enough time worrying about my mentees, but for the sake of argument), I’ve got plenty of time for that. My manager has about 19 more engineers like me to worry about, I’m lucky he knows my name and could pick me out of a police line up. Your manager may or may not be able to fix a problem, but they can’t try unless they know one exists, so always just tell them. Which leads into…

Be honest

Often easier said than done, to be fair. But this is crucial, especially if you’re not happy. If something’s wrong, a good manager is always going to want to fix it rather than let it get worse. Maybe at times I can push this too far or be more honest than is potentially beneficial for me, but there have definitely been occasions where being forthright about how wrong some things have been and how seriously I take those things has led to positive change and everyone being happier.

Complain, don’t vent

I’m aware I have a tendency towards negativity in 1:1s. It’s something I’ve been working on, but nonetheless it’s there. I do complain a lot - I have something of a righteous streak, and if something doesn’t seem right, or fair, or being done correctly, I’m going to bring it up. But as cynical and pessimistic an exterior as I may put up, I think I’m actually quite optimistic and naive. If I’m complaining, it’s because I still think it can be changed. And more importantly, I try to complain only when I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is and do what I can to fix it. Intern hiring not good enough? You better believe I’ll volunteer to take over. Another team holding something up? I’ll set up meetings and talk to whoever I need to. We need better equipment to do our jobs? I will document example after example after example in War And Peace length emails of why our current kit doesn’t cut it in order to make that case easier for him to argue. As my manager well knows.

Complaining about futile things is just venting for the sake of venting, and that’s for coworkers and the pub after work. Complaining about things that can be fixed but shirking any responsibility to do anything about it is just selfish. But if you know change is possible, and you’re willing to roll up your sleeves to make it happen, run with it.

Build a rapport

All of the above is only possible because I trust my manager, and I like to think he trusts me. I know that if I tell him something in confidence, it will stay that way. I’ve definitely at points staked my job (and meant it) on certain things, knowing that it wouldn’t come back to bite me. It’s also just nice knowing that we can chat about food and festival line ups and just shoot the breeze at the same time as talking about serious issues without that being difficult. If your relationship with your manager is implicitly antagonistic within an us-vs-them setting, issues become fights rather than discussions.

Bonus: find ways to experience it the other way around

I have regular 1:1s with about 4 mentees at this point, and even if that’s not quite the same relationship, it’s absolutely been an insight into how to behave on this side of the table. This is probably a post for another time, but the basic empathy that you’re still talking to another person and to be considerate of that is key. This is also something we do as part of the intern hiring process here - by getting the current interns to do phone screens and sit in on the interviews, we hope that the next time they’re on the receiving end of the interview, they can be a bit calmer knowing that it’s just someone like them on the other side.

I was ending on a high, though. My last gig was something very special, but before that I’d spent most of January doing Belly Laughs gigs, some of the most enjoyable gigs in Bristol to do. Organised by the Bristol comedy godfather that is Mark Olver, Belly Laughs is a series of charity comedy shows in restaurants every January. People buy a ticket, they get fed and amused, the money goes to the Julian Trust, and they’re such lovely gigs to do. Not least because we’d occasionally get very delicious free food too. There were about 40 of them this January, including 12 in one day for Wapping Wharf night. It’s absolutely incredible.

So when the local food scene ground to a halt, the local comedy scene ground to a halt, and charities were more in need than ever, of course Mark was going to do something about it. We were going to do Belly Laughs At Home. A three hour variety spectacular, filled with the best of Bristol. The message went out far and wide in the Bristol comedy group chat to make a funny video about why they loved Bristol. Restaurants like BOX-E and the Curry House got involved offering takeaway deals for the evening.

A crack team was assembled - I spent an afternoon building a website for all the acts to upload their videos to; the wonderful David Hoare figured out how the hell we pull this together on Twitch. The incomparable Ewins and Kate edited all the videos. And in the middle of it all, Olver somehow made it look effortless.

This all happened in two weeks, conception to one Sunday night in May when more than a thousand people tuned in to celebrate Bristol, food, and comedy.

In a year like this, being part of Belly Laughs At Home was an absolute tonic. It felt like I was doing something. We raised £37,000 for charity. I was seeing my friends on screen being brilliant in a way I hadn’t been able to do for weeks. It felt warm, and comforting, and just what I needed mid-lockdown.

So. I might have quit stand up. But it felt right to make a little something for it. This was a 2 and a half minute routine I’d written a few months beforehand on the train home from London, in a state I can only describe as half hungover and half still drunk. It made me laugh a lot. It worked the first time on stage, but I could never make it fit. So I’m glad it found a home. That and my friends emotionally blackmailed me into doing something for the show or they wouldn’t buy tickets.

None of this is luck, though. This is a matter of hiring those interns who have those qualities in the first place. It helps when getting the interns you want on your team to know the person who’s organising the intern hiring. Luckily, though, that’s me. I’ve been running the intern hiring on the Bristol site for the last couple of years, and the result is two of the best cohorts of interns we’ve had in recent years, something I’m immensely proud of. As I’m beginning to consider how we even begin to go about this without getting candidates into the office, I thought I’d talk about how we go about interviewing and selecting our candidates, which hopefully might be of some help if you happen to be a) trying to hire your own interns, or b) trying to be hired yourself.

Let people on the ground run it

It’s fair to say that the managers have very little to do with running the intern hiring. I’m safely straddling that junior-senior line, as are Niki and Matt who also help pull all this together. We’re pretty much left to our own devices, and by god it works. We’re also very insistent on involving the current interns, which has so many benefits. It lightens the workload, sure, but the interns are the ones who know most what it’s like to be in that room recently on the other side, and can provide often-needed empathy in the proceedings. It’s also incredible experience for them, and once which they’ve invariably highlighted as one of the best parts of being here.

Have a short process

In the scheme of things, we keep our intern hiring process relatively lightweight for the candidates. A successful candidate will have sent us a CV, gone through a 20-30 minute phone interview, and then come in for a single assessment centre. The assessment centres involve a welcome talk, a group activity, some lunch, a technical interview, and a management interview. I sincerely don’t believe you need more than that to pick out the interns you want to hire for the year, and all our candidates comment on how much more enjoyable our hiring process is in comparions to their other applications (inasmuch as any hiring process can be “enjoyable”)

Start early

In previous years, we were chronically late hiring interns. It would take ages for the recs to get opened, we would push it until March or April, and at that point all the top candidates had obviously found their place with the FAANGs and the banks. We’ve been reigning that in massively over the last two years, making sure that we’re getting our assessment centres in and offers being made before Christmas. Judging by the quality of both candidates and hired interns, this is absolutely making a difference. Our job here’s not quite done yet though - we need to be earlier this year, starting about now, really. Last year we started having candidates we’d invited to an assessment centre ring us the day before to say they’d accepted an offer at one of the big boys - a good sign that we’re starting to get that level of candidate interested, but not early enough to lock them up first.

Cull the list

We receive in the order of hundreds of CVs for our internships each year, and it’s simply not feasible to talk to all of them. We split the CVs up between myself, a couple of my colleagues who help with this, and the current interns in order to help whittle down the list. Here are the things I’m looking for when deciding who’s worth doing a phone screening for:

• A CS-focused degree, or at least CS-adjacent. I really want to see a list of modules, preferably with marks/grades for them
• A Levels plus grades - I know, I know, but it does help
• A list of their technical skills - this normally gives you a taste of what kind of developer they are or want to be, and it’s valuable to make sure that fits with what we do here
• Most importantly, evidence that they’re interested in the subject. Are they doing hackathons? Do they have side projects? Relevant work experience? A GitHub profile? Show me that you’re doing even an iota more than is required from your course, and I’ll probably be phoning you.

I honestly don’t mind what uni you go to, and I really don’t care whether you’ve worked at Greggs and how that’s taught you teamwork and time management or whatever. But hey, I get it, you’re 19 and you need to pad, it’s all good. This is probably the stage we’re harshest at. It’s easy to want to let everyone through, but that’s just gonna make your life harder down the line.

Phone screenings

These are meant to last 20 to 30 minutes, but I’ll be damned if they ever do. This for me is more just a means of getting to know them, and as long as they’re vaguely sensible, they’ll probably be fine. I’ll ask about what their favourite module is, about any group projects they’ve had and how they’ve gone, a couple of quick technical questions. Nothing difficult. We’ll all then meet and mark our screens out of 5, and decide which 12 we want to invite to our assessment centre. We’ll keep a few on hold, just in case.

The big day

We aim to make the interview day as relaxing and calm as possible for the candidates - there’s really no point putting them under artificial stress when they’re probably nervous enough as it is. We do ask them to dress formally, though, to be fair. We give them a welcome talk, let them ask some questions (and see who’s quiet, who’s too loud, and who seems interested), before setting them off on a group activity, split into teams, with a few of us monitoring each team. Not to give the game away, but it’s a task which allows us to suss out who takes the lead, who sits back, who shouts down suggestions and who tries to bring others in. It’s also really valuable to see whether any of them actually think to keep track of the time and how long left they’ve got - you’d be amazed how few do that. They then get a quite delicious lunch and a chance to take a breather for a bit, before the interviews.

We give each candidate two interviews - a management interview and a technical interview, each lasting an hour. Both interviews are conducted by different managers, with a different intern or junior engineer sitting on each one. This last bit is massively important, for a number of reasons. It gives the juniors a chance to experience interviews from the other side of the table, it gives us a slightly more balanced take on each candidate, and I think it also puts the candidates a bit more at ease. We have standardised interview questions for both interviews and ask that the interviewers stick to those as a minimal set, but being free to ask further questions if they have time. We have one coding question. That seems like very little, but it’s surprisingly enough.

The room where it happens

Once the interviews are done and the candidates sent on their way, we have my favourite part of the whole process. We gather in a room, all the interviewers, interns, junior engineers, and us three, and we mark the candidates out of 5 for each part of the day. We go down the list and get each interviewer to quickly give us a mark, then end up with a list of obvious “yes”s, obvious “no”s, and then dig into the “maybe”s. I make sure to actively solicit opinions from the interns/junior engineers, who hold as much weight as the managers do here. The hardest part of this is standardisation across interviewers - we have some who’ll give a 4 or 5 to anyone, and we have those where I have to warn the intern/junior I’m allocating them to keep them in line because they have way too high standards. You learn how to take these marks within context. My manager and I came out of one interview where he said to me “I’ve never given a 5 before for a management interview, but [that candidate] was an easy 5” (to be fair, that candidate was). Having come to a decision, we make offers the next day over the phone - there’s no sense wasting time or playing coy.

No jerks

Finally, we don’t hire jerks. That’s both actual policy at large and also just common sense. We had one candidate this year who got 4/5 for each activity/interview. But at lunch, he seemed like a jerk to the multiple people I asked to keep a lookout. We reflected, and the interviewers conceded that, yeah, as brilliant as he might have been technically, none of us would actually want to work with him for a year. So we didn’t. Being nice and being genuine will go a long way.

Earlier today, he asked if we could have a chat, because he was worried he wasn’t living up to the expectations he’d set himself, that he felt he should have had this done a while ago and it had been weighing on him that he hadn’t finished yet. This is something I think all software engineers feel, and probably most of us do in life just generally. Lord knows I’ve been feeling like that for the last 9 months or so at work with my own project, had felt like that with stand up for the last few months of it, and have still been feeling like that for personal stuff the last couple months.

The advice I thought sounded good in the moment was this:

Get the project “finished”, whatever that looks like. Learn practical, specific lessons from it (“I should have been updating the design document more often” rather than “I screwed the design up totally”). Reflect on the things you’ve done well that you’d notice as an outside observer.

And actually I think there’s something really valuable in there. Most of us, narcissists aside, are able to notice their own flaws, often to a self-paralysing extent (hi!). And of the “most of us”, most of us are able to at least try to work on those flaws, and sometimes we improve, and sometimes we fall back, but we’re conscious of it.

A lot of the time, though, fewer people are really able to identify and embrace the things they’re good at, or the things they’ve done well. Trying to fix the bad stuff is easy, but god it wears you down. Every effort to improve your flaws is just another reminder that they exist in the first place, and it’s no wonder we give up new year’s resolutions so easily. They’re never about just keeping or doing more of the good stuff, it’s almost always trying to undo some bad habit. And so those good attributes flounder, or plateau, or atrophy. You miss out on the positive feedback loop.

I told Harry that I think the ability to both improve your flaws and actively build on your strengths is the surest indicator of going on to become a top engineer. It’s probably true in general. I hope it is. I’m always staggered by my ability to give good advice that I don’t take, and I’m going to make more of an effort to actually listen to myself this time. After all, giving good advice is one of my most positive attributes.

• A never-used Google Glass
• Too many books
• No, seriously, too many books. Like, too many in the flat I had to myself, let alone the smaller flat I now share.
• The ability to understand the Japanese word “tsundoku” - to have the habit of buying books at a faster rate than one reads them - and yet the inability to stop myself fulfilling this prophecy.
• My old flatmate Phoebe’s blanket, so bequeathed to me 5 years ago now
• Pretty much every ticket I’ve ever bought from the Watershed in the last 7 years
• A number of signed setlists from artists including Philip Selway(!), Our Girl, and All We Are
• Old copies of the Metro with lyric fragments scribbled illegibly on them during long bus journeys on the 70 to and from work in the old days
• Insufficient bedding
• A real lack of visual space perception
• Thirteen brand new washing up sponges
• Five extension leads
• Two hot water bottles
• A mug from when I went to see The Muppets at the O2 that has never been used but was still carefully wrapped in newspaper to survive the journey to this flat, such that it may continue to not be used in peace, not pieces
• A microwave. It doesn’t really occur to you that you actually own a microwave until you move into a flat that already has one and you’re struck by the existential terror of what must become of your microwave. You’ve got to take it. Where do you put it? Can you sell it? Who would want it? Why?
• A collection of recipes clipped from magazines by my well-meaning but ultimately optimistic mother
• That being said, my own brownie recipe, perfected over much trial and error but gone unused for some time now
• A box of Cheerios in the cupboard from the time of the last Star Wars film. No, not Rise Of Skywalker. The previous one. Yeah.
• Barack Oblobblehead
• An innate desire or need to live with other people, even if most of that time is spent in a room alone, because as introverted as you can be and as great as it is to spent time by yourself, other people are great too. Even better if they have a dog.
• A bottle of Khazakstani vodka called Black Gold. It is neither of those two adjectives.