I’ve worked with around a dozen interns/co-ops, and only 2 stood out to me. The rest often made me wonder if they could reasonably handle this kind of career. I hope they could!
It’s tough if you feel a degree of responsibility for their success. Mentors are one of your greatest assets early on (and arguably later as well), and to try hard to have them succeed and thrive only to see them languish on trivial tasks is awful.
I think part of the problem is that CS education where I live is awful. The kids come out of school expecting real work to be wildly different than it is, and it hits them like a brick wall.
Maybe a difference between then and now is that "back in my day" CS still wasn't considered to be a "hot" college major. And there was believed to be more flexibility in choice of a major relative to whether you could get a decent job.
Today, there are probably a vast number of entrants who heard that CS is the ticket to a high paying job, and they are also told that an internship is a vital bullet point on their resume, if not a guarantee of a job at the internship site.
Then, as now, students studied under the constant drone of "you will never use this stuff once you finish college." They still have to decide if they're actually interested in the subject matter or not.
A good bellwether of career interest is the students in the youth symphony. They've all aced every subject in high school, plus rocket club, gentleman sports, and orchestra. The program for the end-of-season concert will have a little bio for each graduating senior, including their college interests. Half of these kids want to major in CS.
It’s tough if you feel a degree of responsibility for their success. Mentors are one of your greatest assets early on (and arguably later as well), and to try hard to have them succeed and thrive only to see them languish on trivial tasks is awful.
I think part of the problem is that CS education where I live is awful. The kids come out of school expecting real work to be wildly different than it is, and it hits them like a brick wall.