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What the interns have wrought, 2024 edition
- euclid_now 2y ago[dead]
- colesantiago 2y ago[flagged]
- DGAP 2y agoOnly if you think auto complete, Google, and Stack Overflow also make internships obsolete.
- lsowen 2y agoThe purpose for internship programs generally are to grow the interns skills and establish a talent pipeline, _not_ for their immediate "code lift". Unless you think that AI is going to completely replace developers, then there will remain value in having interns.
- gcr 2y agoMy former FAANG uses internships at the Ph.D. level for both recruiting and talent acquisition. Hiring committees have a way easier time assessing candidates with feedback like "this intern implemented X, Y, and Z beyond their project spec W during the summer" or "this intern goofed off all summer."
- badosu 2y agoHow do engineers enter the workforce? Or do you envision that in the timeframe for new blood to be necessary something will change?
- aketchum 2y agointernship programs are ways to lock in top talent from top universities. I don't know the stats but I bet the majority of graduates end up taking a job at a company they interned with. You still need to hire juniors to have the eventual seniors.
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- tevon 2y agoThis mis-identifies the purpose of intern programs. Interns aren't there to get a bunch done. They're there to evaluate them and convince them to come back after graduation. Even with Cursor + Claude (maybe even because of them?) there is still demand to hiring software engineers. Intern programs are hiring pipelines.
- acedTrex 2y ago[flagged]
- azretd 2y agoThe whole point of an internship isn’t to get low cost work. It’s part recruiting and part teaching students about working in the real world vs. in educational environments. I think companies will take advantage of AI in the future to create efficiencies with the existing workforce and free up their time to solve other problems that AI cannot solve such as user research, reasoned architectures, etc. Can you provide data on the trends so I know where to position my recruiting efforts when internships are “no longer viable?”
- _lvbh 2y agoI agree. Even if it isn’t right, and will probably be damaging in the long run, cost cutting management will likely think this way and thus reduce the number of interns/juniors hired. They probably expect AI to replace programmers by the time the interns/juniors are well trained & this find no point even as an investment. I personally feel like this will cause a crisis later on but who knows
- syntaxing 2y agoI have never worked for a place where interns are hired for work output. It’s always been a talent source and an opportunity for mid or senior level engineers to understand the process of mentoring.
- kdamica 2y agoI wonder what % of the time all the interns have names starting with an A.
- lecunn 2y agoThey didn't just have 3 interns. They decided to showcase just the work of 3 interns. Still funny that they all start with an A.
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- AstroJetson 2y agoI think this is very cool. I ran an intern program at a mutual fund for a few years, and at a major bank for a few more years. We had lots of successes (and some things that never worked out). One year we had an idea for a system. I brought Anderson Consulting in, explained what I wanted, sent them off with a quote. There were two interns in the meeting and they said they wanted a chance. 3 weeks later Anderson came in to pitch what they wanted to do. They did their side show to build a prototype ($175K) and then the system, another $650K. Elapsed time about 7 months. Interns said they wanted to demo what they had come up with after talking to the business people. So they did the demo, Anderson people were going awesome, we will take these active wireframes and build the prototype and come back in 2 months. Interns said, no, this is a full working system, pulled up the code that was behind it, interfaces to the primary DB, etc. Another hour of stuff. So it turns out the interns had built in 3 weeks what Anderson wanted $825K and 3/4 of a year to build. I was (and am) so proud of them. Love interns that you can just unleash. They spent the rest of their internship doing the docs, putting it into production. At the end, my boss, the CIO gave each of them a $100K "scholarship" and job offers to come back when they graduated.