This is a re-post of an article I wrote for Gowalla’s Engineering Blog. You can   view the original article here.  

So You Want to Hire an Intern?

This past summer, Gowalla brought on its second intern, Michael May, a Computer Science undergrad from the University of Texas. In turn, Michael brought us a great amount of enthusiasm and ability.

I had the pleasure of mentoring Michael over his internship. It led me to reflect on my days of interning when I was still at Georgia Tech. Having seen both sides of the intern/employer relationship, I’d like to clear up some common misconceptions about interns, and offer suggestions on how to keep the relationship fruitful and symbiotic.

Myth: Interns are cheap labor! Replace all your employees with interns!

I hear this one all the time from developers — Instead of hiring one employee, they’ll hire three interns: instant three-fold increase in output. Sadly, The Mythical Man-Monthapplies at least as much for interns as for employees.

Reality:

Interns are new employees. Like any new employee, they’ll need a certain amount of ramping-up time before they can start contributing. Others from the team will have to invest time to get them up to speed. And unlike a full-time employee, you lose all that training time when they leave to go back to school. They may be “cheap” on the pocketbook, but their cost goes far deeper than that. The good news: it forces your organization to get good at bringing people up to speed, and to put the right processes and tools in place to do so — an asset for a quickly-growing company.

Myth: Interns are great for doing degrading or extremely repetitive work!

In my first internship, I didn’t have to make coffee, but I did have to make thousands of manual z-folds for brochures we sent out. I also had to wash the bosses’ grill, and even disassemble and fix a toilet. This might have been great for the company I was working for, but it wasn’t exactly the work experience I would have liked to put on my post-college résumé.

Reality:

Interns offer the chance to hire someone fresh out of college who was trained on the cheap and already knows your organization inside and out. If you insist on using your interns for nothing but cheap, mindless labor, you won’t find them knocking down your door after graduation. (Even worse: they might quit on you mid-term.) But even if they’re willing to come back to work for you, how have those chores prepared them to be valuable contributors?

Give your interns the tools and resources they need to do their jobs — not just a desk and an internet connection, but also direction and feedback. The more you treat them like real employees, the more you’ll get back. If your employees aren’t learning from their mistakes, and celebrating their successes, how can the company know if it’s headed in the right direction? Be forward with expectations, and be vocal when those expectations aren’t met, or when they’ve been surpassed. This isn’t easy, but it has to be done.

Myth: Interns are lazy! They’re not capable of doing “real” work.

When I worked for a major American appliance manufacturer, I played Flash games for a whole week because no one could find me anything “I could do.” While it did wonders for my high scores, it was a suck on my morale, and a drain on company funds.

Reality:

I’ve seen interns do incredible things. Once he was comfortable with the code and the team, Michael started knocking out features and closing quite a few GitHub issues. Just like full-time employees, interns want to do work that impresses and amazes. Just like full-time employees, interns work best when they can see how the work they’re doing affects the big picture. Pair them up with different members of your team and come up with a number of different projects your intern can work on. Don’t underestimate their abilities.

Sum it all up:

Interns take a lot of time and energy, but they can be incredibly rewarding to you and your company. If you want to hire one, make sure they have a dedicated mentor, someone who can and should regularly ask: “Do you have enough to do?”, “Is there anything you need?”, “What are you working on?” — and simply, “Are you happy?”. The mentor should have informal meetings with the intern on a regular basis — at least once a week, but perhaps as often as once a day.

You will also need several people interested in spec-ing out tasks for your junior employee — not just for the initial assignment, but to answer the occasional question during the task. And you’ll need employees to do pair programming with the intern until they’re familiar enough with your codebase to take on tasks by themselves. When your intern is busy, your intern is happy. And so is your company.