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Ask HN: Are projects as important as internships?
I'm a software engineering student (graduating next year) and I have done internships every summer for the past 3 years.
This summer I'm thinking of building a web project (not commercial but NGO oriented).
Do you think that on my resume this will be valued? Or maybe recruiters won't see the value of it and assume that I have had a lazy summer?
- kstenerud 11y agoI'm long out of college (and never did an internship), but not a week goes by where I don't get an email from some recruiter or startup cto who's been scanning github and found something of mine. Once you build a project, it stays out there, and with github it's quite visible to anyone who wants to take a look. Personally, when hiring, I'd rather see some code you've written. It also gives us something cool to talk about during the interview, when I'll ask about why you chose technology X, what other things you looked at, how you came to your decision (even if it was "well, it looked good enough I guess" - which is perfectly valid), what problems you encountered and how you handled them, what you think about things retrospectively, etc. Internships can be useful for learning how to interact with others in the office and even for programming experience, but only if the company you worked at actually made an effort to mentor you rather than take advantage of cheap/free labor.
- Raed667 11y ago> rather than take advantage of cheap/free labor. This is exactly what is happening. I'm getting offered 100$/month to rebuild entire apps that usually would require a team.
- dangrossman 11y agoAll employees are guaranteed minimum wage, and an internship where you do work that benefits the company is employment. That offer doesn't sound kosher.
- liquidcool 11y agoThis might be the difference between an internship and a co-op, but when I was a co-op at JPL, they paid a salary comparable to what other companies paid new grad hires. And the total number of months you co-oped was used in their salary formula if you got an offer for a permanent position. The fact that you are getting such a tiny fraction of that - 20 years later in this job market - is astounding to me. Sounds like you could do better on Elance or Odesk, and that's saying a lot.