Who Needs Developer Interns Anyway?! (YOU Might...)

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

what's up it is December 29th it's a Sunday evening um I didn't do much driving between Friday and I mean the entire weekend I don't think I drove anywhere so um I didn't get any videos done and I figured I'd get one before the week starts we're going to go over to Reddit and the conversation is going to be about uh the the post is titled how to convince the company to stop hiring interns so um I'm going to talk through this because I don't think it's quite as uh blatant as I mean as the as the title makes it seem uh which is good we're going to look at some some different angles of this um and yeah I think this week I have definitely have Monday like tomorrow I'll be going to CrossFit so I might be able to get four videos done

tomorrow which will be good because Wednesday is uh is off right for the new year so um I don't know if I'm going to have much driving this week again um so try to get for done tomorrow um and just a reminder before I get into this one if you have questions that you want answered please leave them in the comments I'm happy to go through and answer those you can also look for Dev leader on social media just message me on any platform provide as much detail as you want it'll be totally Anonymous and then a reminder because I am filming this on a Sunday night I'm going to have it posted for tomorrow morning for your commute into work on my Dev leader Channel I have a live stream every Monday at 700 p.m.

Pacific it's top topics just like this um except it's live and uh it's an AMA format so uh you're welcome to submit anything you want in the chat and I would much rather spend the entire AMA just answering questions and stuff so uh check that out on my main Channel Dev leader 7pm Pacific but okay let's dive into it so um how to convince the company to stop hiring interns the context for this person's post is that they're saying they're at a startup and it it seems like from their perspective the company that they're at is trying to hire interns to like save money like hey we need developers we don't got a lot of money if we just keep hiring interns they're cheap we'll get stuff done like this is it's kind of like a hack to try and get productivity or to get

output is I think what this person's trying to say from their perspective and um as a as a software engineer they're kind of feeling the the friction with that so um it seems like you know small team uh they have to ramp up interns they ramp them up the interns are gone after not a long period of time so there's this like a lot of overhead with trying to get interns ramped up and so I think it's it's interesting they say kind of at the end of this they said uh I'm either forced to only give them uh crappy or useless work or to figure out a way to provide a hint that this is just wasting everyone's time and not leading to any benefit since we're limited on resources and investing time in transient members is not a very wise idea any thoughts so

you can kind of tell like they're frustrated by this and I think just to to call it out I don't think that they're suggesting like interns are bad I hate interns or anything like that I think they're kind of feeling this pain of being at a small company small team um and just you know kind of like they're spending a lot of time with interns and they're not feeling like that's a good investment so I want to talk about this from a few different angles um before getting into too much of like opinion or whatever I just want to give you uh sort of high level disclaimer like in my career especially before Microsoft when I worked at Magnet forensics I I think that I had interns every single month of the year for eight years I think so a lot of places will do

like feel like this is more popular in the US in particular but like summer internship right College University students they have their Summers off um I lived and worked in a town called uh waterl and that's I went to the University of waterl there's a lot of like internship or co-op programs there and they're not just in the summer they rotate like every other semester um and I'm not sure I'm assuming other schools in Canada and stuff do this kind of thing too sometimes but we we had interns all the time so and it was usually for 4 months there was a college called cono College we had interns I think from 8 sometimes up to like 16 months at a time um but most common was like a four-month placement but I wanted to say this before getting into you know sort of the

meat of this conversation because I've spent a lot of my career working with interns even at Microsoft we had interns there was um what two years ago time flies man I don't know might have been three years ago two or three years ago I had like four interns at Microsoft and I wasn't even expecting to get any like we submitted projects and I thought I was doing it on behalf of like the larger org and then and then I was the intern manager so I was like oh crap what do I do um and they were in person and I had only been like fully remote at Microsoft so like it was a you know uh super interesting experience but I have always worked with interns um and I want to say that I have had amazing interns like like mindblowing interns and I've had

interns where they were lack cluster and it was challenging and it was a lot of work to to kind of invest into them so I have seen all different sides of this personally um now in this case okay let's talk about this startup type of situation because when I was at Magnet forensics when I started there it was a very small company I think it was like seven or eight people in total not just like the engineering team but like in total and there was already an intern working there um there were a couple of full-time engineers and there was at least one intern who had started before me I I don't know if they had someone else that had to get let go that was an intern or they were full-time um but like the point is like right from the beginning there were

interns and we made I and I I should say this I don't know if the founders initial strategy was like Hey interns are are cheap let's get interns like that could have been their strategy initially I actually do not know um but at least once I had started there and once we were getting interns like regularly I honestly feel like we took the time to invest into interns I think the way that we looked at this was like we want to hire good people and we know that we're going to need to have a mix of talent that's not just like senior you know like most experienced engineers in the world um we're going to need to have people with experience and we're going to need to have people that are more Junior and we need to have like this I call it like a

pipeline of being able to build up teams and this was like understood very early this was something where we had access to these schools that had lots of students that were looking for internship so like there was availability of this kind of thing and I think for us like I said I don't know originally what you know was kind of going through the the founder his mind and like with the CEO's mind perhaps it could have been hey like we might have a good opportunity to get cheaper labor perhaps but that's not what it was in practice at least because we would have interns come on uh I can remember managing interns and it was like Hey look um and I would talk to like you know to my my boss about this I would talk to HR about this but we wanted to make

sure that number one interns came on and they had a learning opportunity hands down that's it like that is the number one thing and often that would mean that even for some of them that were underperforming a little bit it was like yeah that's a that's a big tax on the team uh and we would I'll talk about how we tried to minimize that but like the goal was still like we want to make sure that people came they were able to have a learning opportunity if they did awesome work like obviously that's great we really want that but um fundamentally like they need to be they need to be learning we want them to have a good time we want to make sure that we want it to feel like a sales pitch to them right we want to be able to say like

look how awesome it was to work here look how much you learned and if we're investing into you we want you to be able to come back like it would be a really good sign for us if at the end of The Internship they were like hey like I'm interested in being able to come back what are the opportunities for that look like like that to us is a win um of course if you have someone that's underperforming or not meeting expectations like we still want to make sure that they have that experience we don't want people leaving and being like hey that that company was crap to work for they were lousy they didn't care about me like we don't want that we want people to either finish and want to come back or they finish and they can at least speak highly of

what it was like to work with us like that's kind of the framing so we always invested a lot of time and effort into interns but that didn't that doesn't mean that it was easy okay so we I would say like we got lucky in having a lot of really good interns um but we also had situations where like you needed to do a lot more I don't I want to come up with a better phrase on like handholding but like we had a lot more guidance a lot more Hands-On effort right um and I think in this person's case they're kind of saying like they're not really seeing a lot of like the awesome interns they're not seeing like we invest the time and it's worth it so um I'll I'll talk about a couple of things that for us made it even better

okay so one was like if we could if we could get interns to come back that were good that really helped because it was like okay the next time they come back there's going to be a little bit of ramp up right because they're kind of getting refreshed after coming like going to school coming back things have changed we're rapidly evolving as a fast growing startup but it's not like they're learning from scratch right so their ramp up time compared to a brand new intern would be significantly faster okay so that was one thing was being able to have them come back number two was like if we had internship programs that we could participate in that allowed for longer internship periods huge benefit there's a risk which is that if you had a intern that was under performing you now have them for longer

doesn't mean like you could technically um you know fire interns or you know kind of terminate The Internship um I don't know I don't think I ever had to do that I think I had one situation in my entire career that might have been close um and like as someone as a manager like I kind of look at that and I'm like okay I'm I'm going to make sure that I'm spending my time to try and and turn this around as much as possible before I try to to terminate The Internship because especially for interns um having something like that on their record can have like a really negative effect and that's not to say that like you know um it's it's okay to just like cause a like a a negative impact to the company per se but like I I look at this

I've talked about this in other videos if like I want to make sure I'm putting in all my effort to coach and make sure I've done everything I possibly can before having to let go with someone and especially if that's going to mean like kind of tarnishing their record because it will make it extremely difficult for further interships if they were fired from an internship um so I kind of look at it like at least in my experience if it was like eight months or something it's like hey look like we'll try to get what we like the most productivity we can out of the these eight months and um try to make it as good of an experience as possible minimizing the impact to other people on the team so longer time was very helpful coming back was very helpful um I think something

that like to avoid that was helpful was like project like this is the kind of thing with interns that seem like a good fit for projects or like hey if we put them onto something so we we came up with this project it's like not a huge priority so that means it's safer for the intern to do it we'll try we'll get them to make as much progress as possible and then like hopefully they land it and then we have it from the for the their internship one of the challenges with this kind of thing is that a lot of the time because it's typical software engineering the estimates are off doesn't get finished and then you're left with something that's like 85 you know 90% done the intern leaves and you're like okay what do we do with it um so uh we had

situations like this where uh the projects didn't really kind of they were supposed to fit within an internship they really didn't I found that a lot of the time that made like a bigger problem so it was nice that the intern could work on that they could focus on it we could reduce the risk but then we were kind of left with something that wasn't done and we're like okay so we had four to eight months of work usually the eight-month ones weren't such an issue like this but the four months it might not finish so you have four months of work nothing that's like a big project that's landed and you're like okay um so now you have to invest even more time and effort from some full-time people they have to maybe get more ramped up on it uh maybe at that point

they're like oops we're checking out the code a little bit more this has really got to get some more effort there's a lot of things that you can do to try and make this better throughout the entire internship but the point is that finding small projects like this I find if they're not getting landed like it creates more work so um I like having interns come on and deliver stuff that is um going to have some continuity if that makes sense so being able to participate in a larger project and take some responsibility over part of it I think is helpful um but trying to confine the entire internship to like a dedicated Standalone thing feels kind of crappy um we had at one point at Magnet we had interns building our first uh build system which in Hind I'm like every every time I

tell this story I'm like why did we do this um I know like I understand why we did it we we thought it was important but not important enough to actually take full-time people to dedicate to building it that's the reality of it and in hindsight like this is the thing with hindsight right like after spending eight years there like once we've had an actual good build system we were like oh my God we should have done this so much sooner but with the interns what was happening was they were coming on and they couldn't finish the entire build system in 4 months to go put something together and they get most of the way there they were getting some builds output but then what was happening was because we had interns sort of all the time was we would have interns come on the

next period so we'd have someone full-time trying and bridge the gap between the interns on this build system so you'd have a period at the end that's like making sure the full-time person's ramped up and understands it then you'd have this next period when the next inter starts they're trying to ramp up and it was like it was so ineffective because there was no like I shouldn't say no continuity minimal continuity if in my opinion if we would have had someone full-time working on this and then augmented their efforts with uh with interns I think that would have been more helpful um but it truly felt like just enough effort from a full-time person to like tell the next intern coming on what they're going to be working on um yeah just like challenging I so a recommendation I would have is like really think

about continuity with projects or else you end up having a lot of good work done but potentially not landed another thing that you can do and I mean this is just good software engineering practice in general is like when you're having any developer but in this case we're talking about interns like try to break up the deliverable so that they have something they can land right so It's Tricky depending on what projects you're giving interns but that's why I'm trying to say like kind of frame it this way if you're able to have them land something like periodically throughout the the time and I don't just mean oh their code is landed but like it doesn't work like truly try to break things up into like an MVP or like just different components they can land and that way things are usable throughout the period

um just helps kind of drisk things but what I'm explaining right now is like if you're just familiar with trying to uh decompose deliverables into smaller pieces same idea but keep that in mind for internships I think it's really helpful um so those are some ideas um something else I wanted to mention regarding what this person's talking about because this is a different angle here is like they're saying how do I like what do I do here because clearly they're having interns come on this person's feeling like there's a lot of time invested um by the way I should let me talk about this one thing before I pivot um in terms of like I I wanted to say like minimizing impact of like challenging interns and stuff at least how I would structure interns coming on is I like to make sure that I

have someone on my team that I'm able to make the intern buddy pardon me um so it's a really good like informal leadership opportunity pair someone up uh to give them uh ability to Mentor coach guide people through um I find that for really Junior people not a good recipe because they're trying to figure out for themselves but for someone that's kind of uh midlevel to senior uh I think it's a really good opportunity at the like the principal and higher level I not that it's not like worth their time and effort feels like a bit of a distraction because these individuals are able to get the mentorship and coaching opportunities with the the senior people on the team right so I like kind of looking at mid to uh to senior if you have really strong Juniors um that could be a good opportunity

too but I would say those people are probably on the cusp of being mid-level anyway so something to think about um when you do this I think like I said it's good for coaching opportunities some different career growth but I need to make sure that I'm in tune with the intern buddy because if they're like hey like things are pretty challenging I don't I need to make sure that I'm not having them be so distracted right because they're like look like I got to do like I have to spend so much time with this person and the output's not very much that's where I might need to step in and this is sort of my own like leadership style I guess when I talk about managing teams My ultimate goal is to make sure my team can do their best work possible and I also

need to make sure that they can grow in their careers and I need to align things to business but but that first part enabling my team to do their best work possible priority number one for me that means if they're getting really distracted with an intern and that's bleeding over into some of their other work like they're like I can't get my done I'm very focused on this I just want to do a good job with it but it's so demanding I will step in as much as needed uh that means if they need more oneon-one time with the intern let me step in and do that is it a great use of my time I don't know but I want to make sure that I'm enabling my team to do their best work possible so for me this is kind of like I think

from some startup times right but um if that means I need to do carote a little bit more time for my schedule I'm going to do it um is it something I'm super stoked about not necessarily um but I want to make sure that I can help the people on my team and if we can try to turn this around together to make it a productive you know educational experience for the intern then I want to do that so it's challenging but what I'm trying to call out here is that to minimiz impact on my team I will try to step in um like I said it's been pretty pretty rare that a conversation of termination for an intern comes up in my experience um but that's something that you know if I were talking with the intern buddy I would want to make sure

that if that was like Hey we've been trying everything I've been stepping into help and there's like still like another 4 months or something if it's like hey if it's not working like we should have a conversation but something to think about so the other angle sorry for the uh the back and forth here the other angle here is this person saying like how do I tell management leadership like this is not a good strategy and um on like this is obviously going to depend on kind of like your your own personal investment into the company like are you are you just doing this because you want to be there and you got got a paycheck hopefully not I feel like that's kind of a crappy way to go throughout your career um so hopefully it's not that if you are invested into the company

you enjoy it what's your working relationship like with leadership whether that's you know in my case it was like the CEO and the founder which was the CTO like I felt like I could have a conversation with them about anything so if I needed to in this case I was like if I were in this situation where I was working I would I would go have a conversation and be like hey look what I'm observing is that we're bringing on these interns I think it's a great opportunity for teaching people having a good pipeline of potential people to come through but the overhead that we're experiencing with the constant churn just from the four-month period it's not really a good fit given the maturity or the size of our teams so what are some options well we have one of the teams that's much bigger

and they have more senior people on it maybe we could look at having interns only for that team so let's reduce the overall amount number of interns okay that's one option option number two might be hey look like same kind of argument going on here but uh because of the overhead like maybe we should consider only getting interns that are 8 months long or maybe we have enough teams and enough variety where we can say hey for the eight-month interns let's put them on the smaller team can probably take that on and the larger team could probably take on the four-month interns the number of interns that we can support this is a conversation that actually did come up a lot the number of interns we could support and there were different points in uh where I was working before magnet where the the life

cycle if you can call it that of the company like the growth trajectory what was going on there were different phases where I felt like we could support more or less there were times where you know I would say like based on what's coming up for us and how things have been going it's going to be challenging for us to take on an intern so we need to make sure that we're bringing on an intern uh if there's a handful that we're looking at to hire maybe we're going to bring on five interns across all of our teams like we don't have capacity for someone that's very Junior so if they're like a first year student like we might not have capacity this time around but we could take on someone more senior and that might change right that might different phases we might say

hey look we actually have solid group of people on the core team like we can take on someone more Junior because we have a few senior people that can support that so what I would recommend to this person is like number one think about your your sort of working relationship with leadership if you find that that's already awkward like you can't have a conversation about that I don't know the reporting structure based on this Reddit article so something for you to think about is like is that a conversation that you need to have with your own manager depending on how many levels there are to say this is what I'm experiencing maybe your manager can help you know represent that perspective up through leadership and Executives perhaps um maybe this is something you can you can actually get some perspective from the other Engineers depending

on how big the company is and how many interns come on what's their experience been like maybe there's something you can learn from them about making this better or perhaps they're going through the same thing and then you can kind of collect that information again bring that to your manager bring that to to leadership and say hey look like this is kind of like a theme that's been going on um I and this might kind of sound obvious but what I probably wouldn't do is just go right into like the financials of it and say like you guys are being dumb here you're bringing people you're just trying to cut corners and save money like I I don't feel like that's a productive way to do it so I would talk about the impact that it's having on the team right if if and again

like if their goal is to say we want to make sure like we we are trying to hire interns because it's costeffective from our perspective if that's their philosophy I'm not here to say that's right or wrong if that's their philosophy then I would share the data back with them about the effectiveness of it okay so you bring on an intern for 4 months but we're spending I'm just making this up we're spending two months ramping them up and the last two weeks or last half a month is like they're kind of winding down to be able to present their internship project or get something ready for school for it so we really get like a month and a half worth of work of productive work if we get a good intern and I'm just making these numbers up right but if you can go

through that thought process and say okay so you're paying this intern at a discounted rate you might be again maybe you don't have to go into all the details but to be able to kind of I don't know like put some perspective together around this it's like just so you're aware here's the amount of uh Effectiveness we get out of an intern in the current way that we're operating maybe that's a good data point for them to go oh crap hm like maybe that actually isn't so effective because we do this three times a year if every intern is again just making this up two months of ramp up time before they're effective that's uh that's six months that's half the time completely gone maybe it isn't so good right so I want what I'm suggesting is like bring the perspective and the impact that

it's having if you have some ideas for solutions to try and make those things better I think that's great but ultimately like the people that are running the business are going to be making final decisions on this so um trying to this is just my opinion on it trying to interject to say like no this is how you have to do it I just don't think that's helpful but providing the perspective about what's actually happening I think that that can be very valuable um that's sort of a that last statement is kind of a general thing that I had experienced while working at Magnet which was a startup that grew to a midsize company like a few hundred people was that throughout my tenure there because I was there as the company was growing I had a lot of autonomy um and there was a

lot of trust that was put in me to be able to try navigate things right so if I had feedback I wouldn't go into conversations with like the VP of engineering or the CTO and just be like look man like you got to change this stuff around this is garbage like we're losing money on like nope it would just be like hey like want to sit down and talk like I think um noticing some challenges or noticing some inefficiencies that I just want to talk through and just present my observations like I said if I have solutions to go along with that that could be helpful and those might be things we try right but I want to give the information to the people that are making the final decisions and uh the other point that I mentioned was like if you can collect data

from others going through this I think that's helpful either for you to learn from or for you to kind of supplement some of the perspective that you want to share so uh with all that said I've had an amazing time working with interns uh in my entire career uh whether that was while I was a technical manager so being an individual contributor and a manager and having interns with us or or at Microsoft where I'm a full-time manager like I don't have any individual contributions and and trying to lead teams with uh uh with interns on them so um I don't think the answer it depends on the company I don't think the answer universally is just get rid of interns um but I do think that there are situations where having interns can be very ineffective and I think that there are situations where

having interns can be a huge uh Boon if you will to uh the team and and what they create so um yeah I think like anything in software engineering it depends so have a conversation about it and uh I uh I hope that anyone who's going through that kind of experience with interns and stuff like yeah have a conversation about it and I hope that that works out well for you so thanks for watching and I hope to see you next time take care