he is trying to pay his dues. its an intern position. at the very low level.
So if they went directly for big name that isn’t exactly paying their dues.
Maybe writing tests is paying your dues, because it often feels like a thankless job. Building UIs in a JS framework... Those could be "paying your dues", or more precise getting real world development experience.
But there's a lower limit to that "paying your dues", when it comes to educated professions.
It kind of reminds me when I got asked for an internship experience if I had any experience doing large Python 2 to 3 migrations. The job description didn't even use the word Python. (I later found out through Glassdoor that this company paid interns about the same rate as the entry rate for the H&M down the block.)
If so, that's awfully wrong. I still had an interview loop and all at the company I joined. All he really did was refer me to a recruiter and matched me up with a team that he knew needed an intern. I'm sure his referral meant something but it wasn't an automatic job offer at all.
Seems like an unfortunately odd leap to consider that not doing the work to get the job.
And being a junior programmer isn’t “having a big corner office” or “being at the top”. It’s literally the bottom of the software engineering ladder
No one really expects much from them.
But I personally like that blue collar work ethic.
I think it’s really easy for people to accidentally have a net negative impact on the productivity of a team. Especially early in their career, especially if they’re only there for a few months.
Having interns is probably still worth risking that - they bring some life and variety into an office and they’re only around for a few months anyway. But I would be leery about adding a junior engineer to my team if we’re using manual memory management and they don’t get it. You might have to obsessively code review all their stuff to make sure they don’t introduce memory bugs. Memory correctness in iOS programming probably usually doesn’t matter that much, but a bit of wariness is reasonable and understandable.
Overworked engineers might also not want to spend their time handholding an intern if its not in their KPIs to do so, and they don’t consider that to be part of their role. This is a cultural thing as much as anything else.