Sometimes it's good to give them a repetitive project where you give them one task and have them repeat it. I once trained an intern to do molecular biology from basically nothing, he made 50 mutants and tested 25 in three months. He got a publication out of that.

On the other hand, I have an intern now, who I've taught go (she made a cli and learned tdd) and had her set up a tensorflow deep learning pipeline, which is not repetitive and very exploratory.

I want to be your intern!

Yep it comes with it's perks - I arranged a one-on-one lunch with a nobel laureate for each of my interns back when I was a scientist!

I thought this was the whole point of summer interns, the other point of summer interns being that it's a trial run before you decide to hire them full time after graduation.

That's what my old company used to do (who originally hired me as an intern). The interns were tasked with a brand new project, something that wasn't business critical but would be a great new addition to the product.

Then when we came on board full time were were slotted into the regular development flow.

Using interns as grunts seems like a poor allocation of resources.

If you're not using interns as a way to develop your future talent pipeline, you are doing it wrong.

Companies that are well run and growing do this. A lot of other companies uses interns (particularly unpaid interns in years past) as ways to save money on menial labor.

Unfortunately a lot of non tier 1 status companies especially in Europe and the developing world treat "interns" as a way to get cheap workers and abuse the system.

Non high end tech interns where always treated like grunts especially in high status industries and often had to work for free.

I can't speak for the developing world, but I wish they hadn't outlawed unpaid internships in the US. In a world where millennials are having a hard time breaking into the work force because they "lack experience" we should not have increased the barrier to getting experience.

One of my favorite Youtubers is Curtis Stone whose channel is about micro-farming, basically farming in your yard for income. He is a big proponent on education and used to allow people to come intern with him for a few weeks (unpaid) to learn how to start their own micro-farm and then they'd leave and start their own small businesses. Now he can no longer do that, he instead has to charge them tuition. The students basically have the same experience they would have had as unpaid interns, but now they have to pay for the privilege. This is the height of stupidity.

Even in other industries you will not remain unpaid very long if you are doing valuable work. If you get an unpaid grunt work job doing drywall, after a few weeks you can pretty much do drywall on your own. Quit and start your own drywall business if they won't hire you for decent pay. You'll likely make more as a small business owner anyways.

You havn't thought this through, unpaid internships massively massively favor kids unpaid internship at an IB or similar high status job- poor BAME kids or kids from a middle class back ground wont get a look in.

To the extent that employers might prejudice against bame kids, do you think raising the cost for employers to try them out helps that situation?

It stops rich kids monopolizing the desirable internships which are a pathway to high status/paying jobs - which is a start.

You mean the rich kids who already have the connections to get the better paid internships to begin with?

Don't think you read the thread - The really desirable internships are the unpaid ones at high status places where its who you know that counts no what you know.

I have read the thread. I agree that high status unpaid internships will largely go to already wealthy, connected candidates. I fail to understand how paying a wage to those wealthy already connected candidates will help the BAME kids.

>>often had to work for free.

At least in the USA it is illegal for an intern to work for free if that intern is adding value to the company.

The relevant guideline is this:

"The employer doesn’t benefit from work the intern is doing, “and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded.” [1]

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/when-interns-should-be-pa...

If you don't have tier one interns and you're not the kind of employer who knows Nobel laureates like elsewhere in this thread... Then you can probably just throw away your interns work after the summer. They are just "normal" college students after all. Personally, I know none of my student work should have been used in production.

yeh right and we know that labour law isn't massively flouted

Worst case scenario they spend 3 months banging their head against a brick wall making no headway.

Only if you don't assign a capable mentor.

Interns are great. It's really the only interview process that doesn't suck right now, and I have a newfound respect for new college grads after working at a company with a solid intern pipeline.

Worst case they waste your time which is a big deal.

While I generally agree with your statement, that is nowhere near the worst case scenario.

I've experienced awesome interns who were worth their weight in gold, but I've also experienced interns who were nothing but a massive distraction for the team, a complete waste of time in a startup environment where time is the least available resource, and source of nothing but drama regularly disturbing the entire team.