A personal experience of promoting software engineering interns
While serving as a team lead on a software engineering team, I’ve had the opportunity to hire, onboard, and mentor a few interns. This is a short and opinionated recap of my experience in promoting software engineering interns.
Let’s start with brief statistics. I had four interns in the last three years. Two of them came from college to do internships as part of their studies. The other two were switching fields where they had worked for the last few years. After the internship two of them were offered a Junior Front-End developer position on the team.
Here comes the interesting part. Can you guess which two of them received the offer for the position? It turned out that the persons without the academic background were those receiving an offer.
Please, don’t get me wrong. Personally, colleges and universities are astounding sources of knowledge. By utilizing the access to the information, the professors have. And the tools and equipment the college provide. One can jumpstart her career on a solid foundation. However, in this case, other aspects were in favor of the non-academic interns.
So, what were the factors for them receiving the offer?
- Being referenced by someone our company already knew. One of them was referenced by a software engineer who used to work for us and who we highly respected. The other was referenced by a person with whom our company had successful business relations. As a result, the interns had an implicit responsibility to do their best. Both for the company, as well as for the recommender.
- Intrinsic motivation and deliberate practice. Starting an internship means that there is little or no money coming into their account. At least in the beginning. Being cut from parent support makes it important for them to learn a lot in a short period. To make sure that after a few months of internship they can receive an offer. And start their developer careers.
- Understanding what work means. The previous experience of work gives them an understanding of what it takes to do the job and achieve the goals. They have the experience of working in a team and how it is to collaborate with others to achieve more than personal goals. I also found that they better handle the situation when receiving a constructive critique.
- An alternative standpoint of software development. They hold an unfamiliar perspective of software development. And look at the coding challenges based on their previous experience. This sometimes leads to creative solutions to problems. And their pristine questions might challenge the status quo of the team. How and why the software development process is like it is in the team. As well as challenge the senior engineers to be more explicit in their communication. To explain topics way simpler, which benefits not only the interns.
Once again, please don’t get me wrong. I don’t say that a college degree is worthless and engineers coming out of the system are less competitive. It is just that from my experience, there is more than academic knowledge and degree that allows us to have successful careers in software development.
After these interns have worked for a while and have found their role in web development. I try to encourage them to focus on learning the core topics of Computer Science by attending online lessons, workshops, training. To acquire certificates that serve as proof of their understanding and mastering the craft.
Hope my experience will inspire others who are hiring interns. And give the opportunity to someone new to the field. And who knows; they might find a few gems as did I.
Thank you for your attention and if you found this post useful and would like to read more about random web development topics, just clap for this article or drop a comment here. As always you can find me on Twitter@andrejsabrickis or LinkedIn@andrejsabrickis
P.S. Feel free to reach out to me on how to plan, prepare and execute a successful onboarding and mentoring process for software engineering interns.
