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> By Ksplice Post Importer on Jan 24, 2011 Heh. When interning at Ksplice/Oracle in 2011, I was tasked to import all of the blog posts from the old Ksplice Wor

by lwf 12y ago

> By Ksplice Post Importer on Jan 24, 2011 Heh. When interning at Ksplice/Oracle in 2011, I was tasked to import all of the blog posts from the old Ksplice Wordpress blog into Oracle's system. By hand, because they didn't want to turn on the Apache Roller API, or something. I couldn't set a custom author for each post, so instead I changed my name to "Importer, Ksplice Post".

zachberger 12y ago
I would have left my internship if I was tasked with that.
- mwfunk 12y ago
  Bad engineers are only effective when given tasks that are interesting to them. Good engineers are those who are equally effective when given tasks that aren't so exciting. If you're at the intern level and you're already picking out which tasks are worthy of you and which tasks are beneath you, you may want to think about a different line of work.
  - Everlag 12y ago
    While not disagreeing entirely with the core of your argument, an internship should be about learning rather than handing off the work no one else wants to touch. Is is unreasonable to expect, in a position which is reasonably considered a part of your education, that mentorship, controlled exposure to production systems, and legitimate work will be provided? An internship is not some magical excuse to hire someone likely overqualified to do extremely tangential work for low pay, its a partnership between the intern and the company to perform work that is useful for both the intern and the company. Its not about being a good or bad engineer, its about the work being relevant. Tasking an apprentice welder to change the oil in the fleet of company cars would be more akin to the scenario described: somewhat related but utterly useless beyond a piece of paper saying they did an internship at X.
    - varenc 12y ago
      Knowing lwf, I suspect this took a day or two out of the whole internship...
    - navait 12y ago
      Well, an internship in the software industry here is not really an internship. More like a summer job for CS students: intern just means you're temporary and lowest on the totem pole. I certainly was given jobs that were considered semi-important but that the full-time staff had more important things to do.(They aren't going to pay an intern to do useless work) I still learned a lot, even when I wasn't coding because I was required to learn good practice.
    - lwf 12y ago
      To be clear, I did a lot more than this in my months there :) Most of the time was working on improvements to the customer-facing management webapp, Uptrack. https://www.dropbox.com/s/tqqup4ltz9tphga/uptrack-oracle-r.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/tqqup4ltz9tphga/uptrack-oracle-r.p... However, somebody had to migrate the blog, might as well've been me.
willvarfar 12y ago
You're famous! Or perhaps infamous, going from a blogging platform with the lackluster codebase to one that doesn't autofit on mobiles and was unreadable on my android chrome as it didn't reflow nor pinch-zoom and was just lots and lots of panning.

by lwf 12y ago

zachberger 12y ago

I would have left my internship if I was tasked with that.

mwfunk 12y ago
Bad engineers are only effective when given tasks that are interesting to them. Good engineers are those who are equally effective when given tasks that aren't so exciting. If you're at the intern level and you're already picking out which tasks are worthy of you and which tasks are beneath you, you may want to think about a different line of work.
- Everlag 12y ago
  While not disagreeing entirely with the core of your argument, an internship should be about learning rather than handing off the work no one else wants to touch. Is is unreasonable to expect, in a position which is reasonably considered a part of your education, that mentorship, controlled exposure to production systems, and legitimate work will be provided? An internship is not some magical excuse to hire someone likely overqualified to do extremely tangential work for low pay, its a partnership between the intern and the company to perform work that is useful for both the intern and the company. Its not about being a good or bad engineer, its about the work being relevant. Tasking an apprentice welder to change the oil in the fleet of company cars would be more akin to the scenario described: somewhat related but utterly useless beyond a piece of paper saying they did an internship at X.
  - varenc 12y ago
    Knowing lwf, I suspect this took a day or two out of the whole internship...
  - navait 12y ago
    Well, an internship in the software industry here is not really an internship. More like a summer job for CS students: intern just means you're temporary and lowest on the totem pole. I certainly was given jobs that were considered semi-important but that the full-time staff had more important things to do.(They aren't going to pay an intern to do useless work) I still learned a lot, even when I wasn't coding because I was required to learn good practice.
  - lwf 12y ago
    To be clear, I did a lot more than this in my months there :) Most of the time was working on improvements to the customer-facing management webapp, Uptrack. https://www.dropbox.com/s/tqqup4ltz9tphga/uptrack-oracle-r.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/tqqup4ltz9tphga/uptrack-oracle-r.p... However, somebody had to migrate the blog, might as well've been me.

willvarfar 12y ago

You're famous! Or perhaps infamous, going from a blogging platform with the lackluster codebase to one that doesn't autofit on mobiles and was unreadable on my android chrome as it didn't reflow nor pinch-zoom and was just lots and lots of panning.