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Summer Internships - The Good, and the Bad?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the grade-your-out-of-school-opportunities dept.

loquacious d asks: "This has been a spectacular summer for open-source student internships. Google funded a huge variety of open-source projects through the Summer of Code, including GCC-CIL and other improvements to Mono, new features and fixes for Gaim, and even new packages for Common Lisp. Joel Spolsky at Fog Creek hired four interns to produce a highly modified version of VNC called Fog Creek Copilot, and Paul Graham's new venture capital firm Y Combinator helped students create their own tech companies. What internships did people enjoy this summer, and which ones didn't work out so well? Which ones would you recommend to next year's applicants, and which should they avoid?"

3 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Avoid Cheap Labor Factories by guaigean · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ok, so maybe this should have been obvious. One of my internships ended up being for a company that eventually taught me only one thing; pick your jobs carefully. I picked a small company that had a programming internship, got picked up, and found out quickly that I was THE programmer. Turns out they do this regularly, and use the cheapest labor they can find to do their projects. In turn, the permenant staff which was less skilled was making 3 times as much while I worked my ass off and they played horse shoes outside during hot days.

    Lesson learned?
    1. Check out the capability of your employers, supervisors, and fellow employees just as they check you out.
    2. Don't be afraid to ask LOTS of questions!

    --
    Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
    1. Re:Avoid Cheap Labor Factories by Herr+Joebob · · Score: 3, Insightful
      a company that eventually taught me only one thing; pick your jobs carefully


      If that's the only thing you learned, it was still well worth your time... :)
  2. Re:"even new packages for Common Lisp" - hey! by Wolfbone · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The perverse unpopularity of Lisp is very frustrating. Even searching for Emacs Lisp packages turns up less current activity and more cobwebs than I'd have expected given Emacs's widespread use and Lisp's extraordinary power, and I've so far failed to get any of the GUI toolkits to work with SBCL or CLISP under Gentoo. I read mind-boggling and inexplicable opinions such as this and I wonder if Lisp is a case of pearls before swine in the computing world, but I do hope you're right about it attracting a lot of attention lately.