I don't think that's so unusual. I've often seen interns get the kind of cool, scoped and unordinary task where half of the team was like "damn, I wish I could'

I don't think that's so unusual. I've often seen interns get the kind of cool, scoped and unordinary task where half of the team was like "damn, I wish I could've done that" - but the reason is usually very boring. - it's not guaranteed to succeed at all - it's not important enough to put someone on it for a few weeks or even 3 months - it's not touching production code - it's a greenfield project where you can let them start and not have them understand your huge code base Yes, this may not be true for the ones listed there, but for example the Wireshark analyzer is probably used for debugging, so it would be "better than nothing" even in a half-baked state and then can be improved gradually. The scheduling thing can at least be tested beforehand, and rolled back. Scoped and usually low-risk, doesn't mean not interesting or not hard.