How to get value out of interns

*** Disclaimer: This is about all companies everywhere, not just the one where I work right now ***

Definition: Interns/co-ops are usually college students, recent-college-grads (RCGs) or sometimes, just a person interested in trying your line-of-work, but needs practical experience. The intern works for you for some period of time, usually 4-6 month cycles (eg. semesters). It is sort-of a “try before you buy”. Upon completion, you both decide if you want to hire, or move-on.

Pre: Before you can get value out of an intern, it is critical (and a little obvious) that you BOTH want to get some value out of it. I want to emphasize “both”.

Intern’s Value – eg. What’s in it for me (the intern)?

The first, and most obvious is money. Like duh. There are harder ways to earn money, for sure. An internship sounds like a much better deal than an ordinary summer job. Guess what? Money is the least-valuable reward that an intern can get. The work that an intern will do, is probably going to be the beginning of a career.
The biggest prize is “resume candy”. Anyone with a blank (or sparse) resume will find it hard to land a dream-job (unless your family/friends hook you up). Nobody wants to be your first employer because it is all “investment” from the employer’s side, and it takes a while before you will show ROI. So, if you are lucky enough to score an internship, consider your good fortune and don’t screw it up for the next guy by being a putz. Please try to give these philanthropists some kind of ROI.
Relevant experience is the most-rare. I say this because “real engineer work” is usually over-the-head-of an intern. Think what happens if you give [prod server access] to somebody with no-experience. (** shiver **). Yikes. But it does happen for some interns, just not on day-1. Some receive great opportunities like this, by plain-luck, and some genuinely earn it.
Other bonuses could be: receiving mentoring, advice for navigating corporate seas (and maybe corresponding storms) and the opportunity to observe professional and successful people. (ie, the kind of person you could be someday)

Corporate Value

Ah. This is a tough one, because it is mostly “give”. Oh and also giving. Did I mention giving? Yeah. The more technical or complex the job/work is, the longer it will take to get ROI. Because some stuff is complicated and delicate and you can’t take a chance on letting a noob crash your servers, or accidentally screw up your builds, performance drain, security caveats, etc. It just requires lots of investment. The dream is: maybe there could be some ROI. But it is a gamble. Everyone involved needs to have expectations set. Be realistic and focus on gaining the outcome that you want.
Reputation – When I was a senior in engineering school, all of my classmates were talking about “where are you going?” “Who do I want to work-for, and who should I avoid?”. So having a good corporate reputation could help attract better noobs. Hearts & minds.
Known-quantity – Once you’ve invested in a person, you have a good idea who you are hiring. You did the “try”, so there is much less risk for the “buy”. Interns would prefer to work for you too because they also know your company and (natural) fear-of-the-unknown is less of a factor.
Value/ROI – If you really did a good job of mentoring / raising / investing-in the intern, they will probably have skills above their resume & paygrade. Your team can reap the benefits now.

Planning for value

Breaking-in an intern is a little like starting a new gym/workout routine, you start small and build upon it. The base strategy is to build positive momentum: accomplishments & success. Regardless of what your company and department really needs right now (wrt skills & progress), your intern will need tasks which are certainly completable by someone with little experience. This may (probably will) require concerted planning and strategy.

Here are a few tasks, with increasing complexity, designed to get small wins and increase complexity gradually.

Easy – Any noob should be able to complete without guidance or research
– Log aggregator – find log files, copy them from remote to local
– Log summary – count similar messages, group by day, find “hot-ones”, top-ten, new fires
Improvements – “now that this works, let’s make it better”
– Design improvements
– Better features for an existing program (scheduler, compare yesterday’s summary to today’s, email a summarized report to someone, history search for server/error logs)
Realistic 101 – Make somethings simple for another team.
– Pick a real requirement for a real project, something small
– A game called “read the error log and find the corresponding line of code”
Research – use some interesting new tech to make something simple
– Understand how the new tech works
– How to apply it
– Deal with new quirks (do this, don’t-do this, can’t do this)
Maintenance – simple fix to something in-use which was written by someone else
– Support “line 2” (ITIL intermediate level). Can you fix it or do you escalate it (with notes)?
– Minimal changes (fewest lines of code)
– Expect a noob to eventually suggest “rewrite the whole thing”. Explain why not.

With these tasks, keep-in-mind that the intern will often a) not know where to get started, b) get stuck and not know how to get un-stuck, c) be bashful about admitting it, d) need frequent guidance (more frequent than either of you may expect), maybe a little hand-holding at times, e) need mentoring about how to attack a problem from different directions, dissect a problem, divide and conquer, diagnose a problem, f) need mentoring about people: manners, when to stay quiet and when to speak, be respectful, humble, be prepared, g) corporate stuff like meetings, status, timesheets, vacation, social, work-appropriate stuff

Having an intern in your department can be a complete waste of time, or a valuable experience. The key differentiator is mindset and preparation. Applying a half-effort will probably yield less-than a half value. So if you choose to do it, choose to do it well, and earn a win.