This really hit me this morning, and the timing couldn't be better. We took on a CompSci intern from an Ivy League for the summer. Tomorrow's his last day. When

This really hit me this morning, and the timing couldn't be better. We took on a CompSci intern from an Ivy League for the summer. Tomorrow's his last day. When he first came on, I was really trepidatious; I couldn't put my finger on why, but this blog post sums it up perfectly. We're doing important work, but it's not "hard puzzles". It's "hard" work, but we work with boring technology and solve boring technical problems ~ I was worried about how this go over with the intern from the Ivy Leagues. Day one we're tearing down hardware with vice grips because the guy with the hex-drivers is out and splicing wires. Tomorrow's his last day, and he seemed to really enjoy it, but I think he enjoyed it because it was not "just another hard puzzle" - he was given "ultra-vague end goal", had to "prioritize many different sub-problems", and "probably don’t even know what all the dimensions are, let alone which are the most important". Much different from all of his academia... I'm glad he enjoyed it, and I feel good having provided a valuable experience for a talented budding CompSci engineer.