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Interns are awesome and smart. Never give them garbage work. Give them a challenge and see if they can handle it. Worst case scenario, you throw away their work
by cjensen 8y ago
Interns are awesome and smart. Never give them garbage work. Give them a challenge and see if they can handle it. Worst case scenario, you throw away their work after they leave, and they have learned some stuff.
- dnautics 8y agoSometimes it's good to give them a repetitive project where you give them one task and have them repeat it. I once trained an intern to do molecular biology from basically nothing, he made 50 mutants and tested 25 in three months. He got a publication out of that. On the other hand, I have an intern now, who I've taught go (she made a cli and learned tdd) and had her set up a tensorflow deep learning pipeline, which is not repetitive and very exploratory.
- AETackaberry 8y agoI want to be your intern!
- dnautics 8y agoYep it comes with it's perks - I arranged a one-on-one lunch with a nobel laureate for each of my interns back when I was a scientist!
- TrainedMonkey 8y agoWorst case scenario they spend 3 months banging their head against a brick wall making no headway.
- alistairSH 8y agoOnly if you don't assign a capable mentor.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoI thought this was the whole point of summer interns, the other point of summer interns being that it's a trial run before you decide to hire them full time after graduation. That's what my old company used to do (who originally hired me as an intern). The interns were tasked with a brand new project, something that wasn't business critical but would be a great new addition to the product. Then when we came on board full time were were slotted into the regular development flow. Using interns as grunts seems like a poor allocation of resources.
- walshemj 8y agoUnfortunately a lot of non tier 1 status companies especially in Europe and the developing world treat "interns" as a way to get cheap workers and abuse the system. Non high end tech interns where always treated like grunts especially in high status industries and often had to work for free.
- felipemnoa 8y ago>>often had to work for free. At least in the USA it is illegal for an intern to work for free if that intern is adding value to the company. The relevant guideline is this: "The employer doesn’t benefit from work the intern is doing, “and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded.” [1] [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/when-interns-should-be-paid-explained https://www.propublica.org/article/when-interns-should-be-pa...
- true_religion 8y agoIf you don't have tier one interns and you're not the kind of employer who knows Nobel laureates like elsewhere in this thread... Then you can probably just throw away your interns work after the summer. They are just "normal" college students after all. Personally, I know none of my student work should have been used in production.
- walshemj 8y agoyeh right and we know that labour law isn't massively flouted
- newnewpdro 8y agoWhile I generally agree with your statement, that is nowhere near the worst case scenario. I've experienced awesome interns who were worth their weight in gold, but I've also experienced interns who were nothing but a massive distraction for the team, a complete waste of time in a startup environment where time is the least available resource, and source of nothing but drama regularly disturbing the entire team.
- gazarsgo 8y agoInterns are great. It's really the only interview process that doesn't suck right now, and I have a newfound respect for new college grads after working at a company with a solid intern pipeline.
- Thaxll 8y agoWorst case they waste your time which is a big deal.