
How to quadruple your productivity with an army of student interns - price
http://blog.ksplice.com/2010/03/quadruple-productivity-with-an-intern-army/
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caryme
I think the key to this really is "Design your intern projects in advance".

I interned last summer at Siemens Energy, working on internal software. Well,
sort of working on internal software. My manager didn't have a project ready
for me on my first day, then it took him a few weeks to pull something
together. When he did, I was done within two weeks.

I was useful, effective, and efficient on the project I was given. Yet because
my project was not designed in advance, I was stuck sitting around in the
office for much of the summer and felt like a waste of Siemens' money.

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mey
That seems to be the typical experience of most contractors.

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jonpaul
The photo showing everyone at work looks like it would difficult to
concentrate and rife with distraction. Why do companies feel the need to treat
their developers like this? I understand that they wanted to get their
projects done quickly, but it seems like that would be a tough place to work.

Hopefully the interns were paid well (this is relative) and learned a lot.

-JP

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turnersauce
When I first saw the photograph of the interns' office, I thought that the
article was a joke. I really don't understand how anybody could program
productively under those conditions.

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wisty
Crowded offices can be good for climbing a learning curve. The biggest problem
most of the interns would face would be setting up their systems, getting the
build to work, and figuring out how to integrate stuff into the system.

Lots of communication is good for that.

If they needed to do any deep thinking, I hoped they would have been allowed
to work from home for a day.

~~~
Groxx
_Crowded offices can be good for climbing a learning curve._

Exactly my experience for my first internship, though it was far from _that_
crowded. We picked up C# and a large framework (and some, a second language)
well enough to be productive in a week and a half. (my top-level comment has
more details)

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prawn
Last year, I was approached by two Dutch trainees (20 and 22 yo) who wanted to
do their trainee placement abroad. I agreed without having done more than
trade a handful of emails with them.

They came to Australia and worked for me for five months. They brought their
own laptops so I only had to provide a couple of desks, second monitor for
each and a chair. I paid them in accordance with a typical traineeship for
them back home (about AUD150/week, which would be around USD135/week). Their
rent (at the place of a friend of mine) was AUD100/week and they supplemented
their living costs with savings and help from their parents.

They were pretty raw as web designers and HTML/CSS guys but got a lot of
opportunities to learn new skills and fill gaps with simpler work. Generally,
they had paid for themselves each week by the end of each Monday. They loved
the experience (we do drink beer and play a lot of table tennis here at the
office!) and it worked really well for me also.

I am a general web studio first and foremost but was able to use them on
various side projects as well - cutting PSDs to HTML, doing logo and page
concepts, general maintenance, etc.

Their supervisor is looking to send more over later this year - they have
intakes (outtakes?) in February and September. Will definitely be doing it
again.

Worth echoing caryme's comment about designing intern projects in advance.
With a sudden boost in manpower to a small business (I'm a sole director with
two employees normally) you can quickly burn through work and have time to
kill. In those times, it's good to have a few side projects you've been
meaning to start. As a sole founder, try not to leave yourself as the
chokepoint if you can avoid it.

Happy to answer any questions about it if people are interested.

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Jun8
"Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself!"

I heard this intern intensive approach is quite popular with large tech
companies in China, where up to half of the workforce could be interns.

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Groxx
My first internship had 6 of us sitting around a table, churning out code,
just after my freshman year. Best thing I've done for my programming, easily.
The supervisor did a good job bringing us all up to speed, and we ended up
picking up C# and their framework in about a week and a half (they had a huge
codebase already), and some of us learned Progress in the same time period
(old english-like query & character-UI language).

The important parts for us to being up and running quickly, and being
productive? Nearly full-time access to one of their main developers for the
first two weeks, they knew precisely what was needed (lots of similar code,
but not similar enough to DRY up), and _we were in the same room_. For at
least half the summer, we were throwing questions back and forth every couple
minutes when we couldn't remember something, and the vast majority of the time
one of us would remember. Immediate question & response was absolutely
invaluable, and I think was the single most important tool to speed-learning
what we needed to know. As time went on our tasks diverged and we knew more,
so we didn't need questions answered as often, but it was massively useful at
the beginning.

Of course, it didn't hurt that they paid quite well. Motivation is always
useful.

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japherwocky
when you say 'student', you mean low-paid, right? Last I looked, it was
illegal to have unpaid interns working on anything your company might actually
use to generate income.

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modoc
Really? I didn't know that. Reference? Not an issue for me, but seems odd to
me somehow....

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jessriedel
This was a real surprise to me too. Here's some discussion I found:

[http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/blog/are-unpaid-
internshi...](http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/blog/are-unpaid-internships-
illegal/)

I figured that if you were getting paid _nothing_ while working on something
profitable for a company, it was assumed you were being compensated with
experience. But apparently, all the company can do is train you while deriving
zero benefit from your training. This seems like a stupid law.

~~~
akeefer
I believe that the law is there to prevent companies from calling ordinary
employees "interns" for the sake of getting around minimum wage laws.

~~~
dpatru
Turning the perspective around, minimum-wage laws can be seen as having the
purpose of preventing low skilled people from learning on the job. One of the
best ways to learn is take a job is the field you want to learn in. You get
paid to learn. This is better than having to pay to learn. Unfortunately
minimum-wage laws make this option available only to people who already have
enough skills that they can produce at least minimum-wage value while
learning. So an MBA-level person can take a manager's job in a restaurant for
low pay to learn restaurant-managing skills, but a high-schooler may not be
able to take a cook's job to learn basic job skills like showing up on time,
being diligent, following directions, etc. because the high-schooler may not
be producing enough net value to justify even minimum wage.

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wyclif
Awesome headline; I bit, thinking this would be a spoof on 37Signals or Tim
Ferriss.

