

Dear Interns - nileshtrivedi
https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/c5e6487a9d20

======
angdis
... continuing, because what is a blog post list without a nice round number
of items ...

8\. You will need to endure a never ending succession of
clueless/condescending/abusive project managers.

9\. The company you work for, most probably, has MBA's who would gleefully
flush your job and those of your co-workers and bosses down the the toilet for
the sake of fleeting short-term profit. Adjust your loyalty accordingly.

10\. You will need to understand that just because someone is a grizzled
industry veteran, it doesn't mean they know shit on any given topic.

~~~
theg2
11\. It may feel like you're being respected by bring given an important
project and maybe even being paid but, odds are your just cheap, possibly free
labor.

12\. The first few places you work at don't always do things right and odds
are you can teach them a lot (wait we can rar files and not use WinZip any
more?)

------
hawkharris
Another important tip for interns: Never work for free. If a company respects
you and your work, it will pay for your time.

------
mathattack
A simpler list:

1\. Show up early.

2\. 2 eyes, 2 ears, 1 mouth - use proportionally.

3\. Work hard and Learn hard.

4\. Be nice to everyone.

5\. Stay late.

I've found very few people who follow 1-5 that have disliked their internship.
It's also the best way to an offer.

~~~
khafra
I doubt the causation runs the way you think it does; and an offer you can
only get by constantly imposing long hours on yourself may not be an offer you
want.

~~~
mathattack
If it's a learning internship (as opposed to a "Get me coffee" internship) all
you can trade for the teaching and money is enthusiasm. Many people treat
interns like a burden from HR, and the way to win them over is enthusiasm.
After you get the offer you can look around at how people work, and decide if
it's worth staying long term.

------
Tichy
Also, watch the movie Office Space and read lots of Dilbert cartoons to
mentally prepare for your mind numbing career in IT.

------
ArekDymalski
Why is this addressed to the interns?

~~~
scrabble
Because the author has likely overheard some interns complaining?

These points seem valid for any developer who hasn't been in the industry long
though.

~~~
angersock
Especially in regards to the "customers are dumb this is dumb why are we being
dumb" programming tasks, I think that a good cure is dealing with the business
side of things. When you have to do sales and think about how your product
stacks up in the marketplace and how people want to use it, you suddenly gain
a greater appreciation for the necessity (if not reward) of such inane feature
requests.

------
ephemeralism
"...(idiot, stupid, simpleton) customers"

Sounds like a great way to view the people you build products for.

~~~
angersock
Can we get past the myth that somehow every customer is a fantastic human
being whose sole aim is to have their life completed by the presence of our
products?

This same refrain--common whenever we bring up, say, gamers being bad
customers--is getting as threadbare as the "privleged" stuff.

At the end of the day, our products serve to redress some shortcoming in our
customer's toolbox. They don't want that shortcoming, or whatever problem that
it represents, and our products are at their best subtle reminders of some
lapse in happiness our customers have.

We don't _have_ to assume anything about our customers beyond what is needed
to deliver product. We _might_ assume that they're nice, that they always give
to charity, that they deeply and truly care about the lines of code we write
to fix their inconvenience, and any number of other things.

Fact is, most customers do not a shit give. Most customers want the cheapest
thing that makes their problem _go away_ and does so as unobtrusively as
possible. Most customers don't understand or care to understand the causes
underlying their current pain point, and most customers even with that
knowledge wouldn't change because _reasons_.

And you know what? That's fine. Hell, that's human. It's our job as
craftspeople to make the best products we can, _because that 's what makers
do_. We don't need these outlandish assumptions about our target audience in
order to kick ass and ship code.

~

Now, as far as the article is concerned, the tone of that is very much
directed towards a young engineer who views (rightly or wrongly) customer
complaints as absurd or moronic. And honestly? Most UI/UX things are clumsy
wrappers over something that a line of commands would very easily solve, were
we to provide our users with a CLI. Our drive is more and more to "don't make
me think" about our interfaces, and honestly that is very much in support of
customer-as-simpleton.

Part of the process of learning business is to realize that, while it is true
that customers are lazy (don't want to spend effort solving their problem) and
simpletons (don't want to think about what little effort they do expend), that
is something that can be made a design constraint and used to make something
that people will buy.

To a young engineer, yeah, people are simpletons when faced with their problem
domain, but they need to learn to ship code for those folks anyway.

~~~
lotsofcows
Also, 50% of people are below average intelligence...

~~~
angersock
That's got nothing to do with it--let's not be mean.

~~~
lotsofcows
Maths is mean? How odd.

