

Ask HN: Best Way to find great interns for the summer? - julien

We're a small startup and we know there is a huge pool of students looking forward to summer to hack on stuff they love. We may a nice place for these guys to start having fun and hack on technologies like Node.js, Websockets or PubSubHubbub. Where would you go to find the best hackers who want to learn and have fun in a startup?
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Travis
Don't forget that if you're US based, it is likely illegal for you to have
unpaid interns. See Mark Cuban's post about this at
[http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-
internship...](http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-internship-
so-you-can-get-valuable-experience-screw-you/)

The line seems to be this: if your interns are materially helping in the
company's core activities, you must pay them. So if they're doing anything
other than made-up-work (dig a hole and fill it in), you have to pay them.

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julien
I fully understand and agree with this. All work needs to be paid. In our
approach, there are some projects that involves our services, but most of them
are about build OSS pieces of infrastructure that may use (or not) our stuff,
but that should be built for the community in general. We're thinking about
stuff like and ActivityStreams mapper, a PubSubHubbub -> Websocket
implementation... etc!

Also, funny enough, Mark is an investor in our company and I read this blog
post a few months ago!

------
angrycoder
If you contact your local universities, they put you in touch with interested
students.

Interviewing the interns is the tricky part.

~~~
dshaw7
Training them can also be more involved than you think. Make sure you have the
resources to have one or more people _drop_ their productivity significantly
while you bring the intern up to speed. Adding interns is a Mythical Man-Month
equation++.

