My Internship Performance Review Said I 'Show Initiative.' They Meant This As A Warning.

The review arrived in my inbox on a Thursday. Mid-cycle feedback. Four categories, each rated on a five-point scale. In the section labelled “Professional Conduct,” someone had written, in the notes field:

“Shows initiative. This has led to some unplanned learning opportunities.”

The unplanned learning opportunities were real. I caused one of them on day three.

What Happened On Day Three

I found a bug in the codebase. I fixed it. I found the deploy button. I pressed it.

What I did not find, because I did not know to look, was the deployment freeze notice in the company wiki, the separate approval workflow, and the fact that the service I had just redeployed handled roughly thirty percent of user authentication.

The on-call engineer paged in at 11pm. He was not angry. He was past angry. He had reached the calm, flat affect of someone who has seen this before and has begun simply documenting it.

He was past angry. He had reached the calm, flat affect of someone who has seen this before and has begun simply documenting it.

The Learning Opportunities

Learning 1: Deployment freezes are not optional. “Optional” is not a word that appears anywhere near the word “deployment freeze.” I know this now.

Learning 2: There is a difference between “I can deploy” (technical access) and “I should deploy” (organizational context). These are very different things. Companies give interns the first one assuming they will ask about the second. Interns who show initiative sometimes do not ask.

Learning 3: When a senior engineer says “nice find,” what follows next determines everything. If they say “let’s discuss the fix,” it is a good day. If they pause and say “how did you find this,” the pause is the answer.

The Review, Interpreted

“Shows initiative” = found things and changed them without asking if that was appropriate.

“Unplanned learning opportunities” = taught others to lock down their deployment access more carefully when interns are involved.

“Strong technical foundation” = the fix was correct.

“Area for growth: stakeholder alignment” = talk to people before pressing buttons.

The Outcome

I did not break production again. Not because I stopped having initiative, but because initiative without context is just guessing with higher stakes.

The second half of the internship involved considerably more asking questions and considerably fewer 11pm pages. My manager called this “maturing.”

The on-call engineer called it “finally.”

Both were correct.