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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. Summer TV by FrankTheCrazy · · Score: 5, Funny

    My internship was in front of my TV.

    It was HORRIBLE. It didn't pay at all, it always seemed that I was unappreciated, and worst of all I was forced to do the same tasks over and over...

  2. 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?
  3. Big companies can be a bit inflexible by koreth · · Score: 5, Interesting
    My last couple years of in college I was an intern at Sun. I displayed some talent and found myself working on some projects that would normally have been given to much more senior engineers. All well and good: the work was interesting and challenging, I was getting exposed to lots of new technologies, and I got to see my stuff used in the real world.

    Then I graduated. I was enjoying working at Sun, so I decided to stay there. Since I wasn't an intern any more, they gave me a promotion -- to the lowest entry-level rung on the technical job ranking ladder, the only place their HR rules would allow me to proceed from an internship. On its face that might not seem unreasonable, but even before graduation I was already doing the work of people two or three ranks higher.

    Okay, fine, I figured, I'm sure I'll get promoted up to an appropriate level before long. Nope! Once again, Sun's HR rules kicked in: it's not possible to promote people at more than a certain rate. I would have to stay for several years before my job title and pay matched the work I was doing.

    Still, I liked working there, so I got over the annoyance and plugged away for a while.

    A year or so later, I got a job offer from a small company for about 40% more money than Sun was paying me, plus a decent chunk of equity, to do work that was just as interesting. My manager at Sun couldn't match the money; he had already maxed out my salary for the pay grade I was in, and HR wouldn't let him promote me for another 6 months or so. I took the offer, and I've never worked at another big company since.

    Now, I don't regret my time at Sun, but I guess the moral of the story is, keep your eyes open and make sure you don't get sucked so far into the first interesting place you work that you miss out on other opportunities. It's a fluid job market out there.