

Common Misconceptions about Summer Internships - pwendell
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pwendell/2012/07/31/summer-internship-misconceptions.html

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lambda
Myth 1 is completely false. While companies will be careful about what they
have summer interns write, they are absolutely expecting to get real value out
of the intern's work. They are spending both money, and the time of the
mentor(s) on the intern; do you think they are doing that for charity? Yes,
you need to plan for the case that the intern doesn't successfully complete
their project; that's why you have things like revision control and code
review, to ensure that they don't do more harm than good, and you don't give
them a project that absolutely needs to be completed by the end of the summer.
Though at most places I've been, there has been more than enough urgent,
mission-critical work that the existing developers couldn't possibly finish,
so some of it does go to interns as it's not like the existing developers
would have gotten to it in that time anyhow. I am mentoring several interns
right now, and their code is shipping to customers already, in a core,
mission-critical component of our stack.

Myth 2 is something that I'm sure that no one believes. Sure, people try to
pick out reasonably scoped and specced projects for interns to work on, just
as they do for anyone to work on, but that doesn't mean that they succeed, and
I can't imagine that anyone would expect perfection. Furthermore, dealing with
ambiguity, changing specs, scope creep, and the like is part of the value of
the internship; you're going to have to learn how to deal with that
eventually.

Myth 3 is about the only good point of advice here. It is difficult for a
mentor to provide enough time for their interns. They usually have a variety
of other things to do. But the interns won't be very effective if they sit
around stuck waiting for help. Being assertive, and asking for help when
you're stuck, will allow you to get a lot more out of an internship than just
sitting around waiting for someone to mentor you.

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calbear81
We have three software engineering interns with us (travel startup, 20
employees) this summer from various parts of the country, we shatter most of
these myths:

1) All of our interns are shipping live code and pushing to production. We
assigned them real projects that our other engineers would have done and pair
them with a mentor who has expertise in that area. Our intern standards are
that we would hire them today if they weren't in school so they are ready to
handle real projects.

2) At a startup, specs and scope are both subject to change without notice but
that's the norm so not isolated to interns.

3) We rely on our mentors to find a schedule that works for them but we also
throw a lot of team events on the calendar so interns feel like they're a part
of the large company.

Many of our full time employees started with us as interns and we often keep
them on part-time even after their internships if we really want to them to
join us after they graduate.

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ceslami
You can write meaningful, production-ready code if you have the skills.

It seems like you have only worked at large companies, which is fine, but that
is likely the core of the "self-fulfilling prophecy" you mention in point #1.
If you want to write production code, don't work somewhere that puts 5 levels
between you and the deploy scripts.

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altcognito
"Myth #2: A summer intern will enter with a well defined, correctly scoped
project that requires no revising."

This myth applies to just about any software development project I've ever
worked on in the span of 20 years.

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jc4p
Where are you interning? Banks? I've "interned" and worked full time at
multiple start-ups, there's no difference at that level other than the pay, if
you know what you're doing or have a passion to learn it.

~~~
Moto7451
Ditto. At a good internship you're not just keeping a seat warm while working
on busy work. Working on production code is a fantastic/superior learning
experience.

