Ask HN: How are you using engineering interns?

[pootietangus]

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.

[JohnFen]

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.

[pootietangus]

Good point. For additional context, I’m not looking to hire, and this is a mentorship program through my high school where they pair students with alums. So my only obligation is to let him shadow me, but ideally I’d find something for him to work on that’s genuinely really valuable.