

Ask HN: Are projects as important as internships? - Raed667

I&#x27;m a software engineering student (graduating next year) and I have done internships every summer for the past 3 years.<p>This summer I&#x27;m thinking of building a web project (not commercial but NGO oriented).<p>Do you think that on my resume this will be valued? Or maybe recruiters won&#x27;t see the value of it and assume that I have had a lazy summer?
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kstenerud
I'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.

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Raed667
> 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.

~~~
liquidcool
This 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.

