Ask HN: How are you using engineering interns?

1 pootietangus 1 5/20/2025, 4:20:16 PM

I’ve got a very smart intern with an A+ junior engineer mentality. He’s just like “give me the smallest bugs and let me contribute something to do the codebase”. But I know how this will go… He’ll solve 10 of these things over the summer, and it’s just not worth the onboarding cost when I’m solving 10 of these things a week. I think this is a failure of my imagination more than anything else. Curious if anyone else is struggling with this.

Comments (1)

JohnFen · 1h ago

Perhaps you're missing the purpose of having an intern. It isn't to get free/cheap labor, it's to help beginning engineers learn how to work and gain a bit of experience.

If you need to view it in terms of "what's in it for my company", you could look at it as a method of trying out the green wood. When you find a great one, you offer them a job. Win/win.

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Ask HN: How are you using engineering interns?

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