Guidebook recently added four wonderful interns to our Engineering team. Even though the summer is just getting started, each intern has already made meaningful contributions to the team. When thinking about the commonalities that made each of these hires successful, I found a few patterns:
- Selecting great mentors to pair with our interns.
- Tuning our hiring process to deliver top-flight candidates.
- Finding great projects for our interns to tackle.
I wanted to focus on that last piece - “identifying a great project for an intern to work on”. What follows are a handful of do’s and dont’s to consider when thinking about the types of projects suitable for your interns.
TIGHT SCOPE (DO)
Ensure that the project is tightly scoped and has clear deliverables. Make sure the project is small enough such that it can be completed in ~2 months.
ACCOUNT FOR NON-DEV WORK (DO)
Be sure to account for the following time sucks when estimating the project:
- Orientation and ramp-up time for the intern.
- Summer months tend to be the time when your core team takes PTO. Remember to account for limited availability from core team members, who would normally be there to guide and coach your interns.
- Intern outings + learning and development exercises. Don’t assume that your interns will be able to dedicate 100% of their bandwidth to development work.
- Internship close out; Including delivering a product demo, adding project documentation + hand-off, and corporate off-boarding.
EXTERNALLY FACING (DO)
When identifying an intern project, think about something with an externally facing component. Ideally, your intern will be able to walk away from their time feeling like they made an impact on customer experience.
HIGH START-UP COSTS (DON’T)
Do not give an intern a project that has high start-up costs or an unclear starting point. You don’t want them to spin their wheels on potential approaches or worse - fall into analysis paralysis mode and lose a full sprint doing research.
LEVERAGE EXISTING PATTERNS (DO)
Alternatively, let them extend existing functionality. This will give them a starting point, allow them to work with existing patterns, and enable them to collaborate with team members that built the existing foundation.
GRADUAL RAMP-UP (DO)
You should ramp them up slowly; steadily increasing the scope of their work over time. While I don’t recommend giving an intern a full summer’s worth of bug work, I do recommend easing them into the codebase by tackling a few bugs during the beginning of their internship. This will give them a feel for your stack, development workflow, and deployment process before tackling a larger project.
BURY THEM IN BUGS (DON’T)
Don’t give them a bunch of low-level, disparate bug tickets. The last thing any developer aspires to be, is a maintenance monkey.
EMBED THEM WITH A TEAM (DO)
Find a project that will require them to collaborate with a formal sprint team. Try to get them as involved with your “regular” team and workflow as possible. This is an excellent way to grow their team-development skills and allows you and your team to figure out if they might be good a long-term fit.
DEMO IT! (DO)
Demo it! Get them excited about the project and excited to show it off to their peers across the organization. The more comfortable they become talking through their project with their peers, the more comfortable they will be sharing it with outsiders.
PHASED RELEASES (DO)
As with anything, try to break-up the project into it’s smallest components before getting to work. Identify milestones with your intern and strive to ship small releases over time. This will provide opportunities for them to receive concise feedback and will prevent development from going off the rails.
Hopefully these tips help you identify a project on your roadmap suitable for the upcoming intern season. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the types of projects you’ve used in the past and the level of success associated with each.
