[gus_massa]

> In addition, it wouldn't matter if new interns worked on something that had already been solved because the point is not to ship what they build, but provide a way to learn and gain experience.

I think you just reinvented school. :)

Probably this is how schools were invented. The problem with school/university is that you must ensure that the students have a good chance to pass the course and that they have a broad knowledge. So instead of real project the teacher must find some good educational project with an easy to measure difficulty. Add some academicism, because teachers like to talk to teacher about cool things, and you get the current educative system.

The idea of internships is that the "students" face some real life project and get some real life experience. But it is difficult to scale.

[utefan001]

Not necessarily, as a Oregon based non profit / a "real" company we can add the interns to the staff web page, we can tweet or blog that Carlos / Carla made this thing or solved this problem the company or software had. When a college emails to verify the internship offer we are able to confirm so that the student gets as much credit as his friend interning at a larger company. We could even have a shitty slow timecard system and have a guy who emails you like the world is ending if your timecard is late. Then we could practice not doing all the wrong things during our daily conference call meetings. Older interns could give really ackward and irrational performance reviews. Why wait to show them what an incompetent boss is like if they could experience it as an unpaid intern? Also practice the many IT nightmares that senior people have been burned by. "Hey can you restore the S drive you have been responsible for backing up?" "Damn, no files below 100 nested levels are here! Did you test the backups to see if they were restoring everything?" "All files are replicated to the mirror sure, cool, looks like accidental deletes are also replicated"

[utefan001]

Basically creating a minor leagues of devops recreating famous or no so famous mistakes that have been made in the last 40 years. "Hey Carlos my emails won't work over 500 miles"