[LRUG] Running tech internships in startups, and doing it fairly

[Murray Steele]

On 1 June 2012 09:58, Chris Adams <mail at chrisadams.me.uk> wrote:

> Hi Murray,
>
> I think the most uncertainty, she I mentioned "fairly" was is basically
> paying for their time, and making sure they're not just treated like a
> cheap employee.
>
> If a someone's going to give a few weeks of their time offering to help
> out somewhere with the understanding that they're trading what they could
> paid elsewhere against being able to learn new skills, then it seems fair
> to at least make sure they can afford to eat, and travel, and ideally be
> able to afford not to have two work one or two other jobs to afford to do
> so.
>
> Yup.  For me the London Living Wage is the ethical, if not legal, minimum
in terms of pay (and Tim made some great points about pay-levels reducing
the pools of who can become an intern).  For what it's worth, it's what we
at Unboxed pay our interns.

So my assumption at the mo is that the minimum an intern would expect would
> be well… the national minimum wage if they're spending a fair chunk of
> their time at a company, and that they're not being placed in positions
> where they're solely responsible for work there (that's why I was
> mentioning pairing or other activities where there's scope for a degree of
> supervision).
>

Again, yes.  In the past we ran a training course then put them on an
internal project (with a mentor) to flex their newly gained skills and
allow us to see how they were getting on.  This lasted about a month (of a
3 month program) and after this we put them on client projects, again with
other Unboxed staff.  This worked ok the first time, but not so well the
second time because we were less on the ball about making sure the interns
weren't floundering.  We're adjusting the process for our 3rd go around and
hopefully we'll make sure the interns have more support.


> However, beyond those basic guidelines, and having not run one before, I'm
> not sure how others have structured to be useful for an intern, without
> being too disruptive to the company, and it would be great to hear it.
>

My experience is that an intern program is quite disruptive, any team you
add them to is going to have a drop, not gain, in productivity (your
existing team members suddenly have to accommodate someone who asks loads
of questions).  Obviously the impact depends on how well you prepared them
and how much they know about programming in general and programming in your
specific toolset before they started.  Maybe you'll luck out and get some
interns that know everything, but if that's the case, why not just hire
them as proper devs on a short-term contract?

Of course, the investment you are making in these people can pay off
handsomely.  We've hired an intern each year as a full-time employee, and
they were able to fit right in and hit the ground running when they join.


> Finding specific guidance hasn't proven to be too easy though so far.
> Here's about all the guidance I can find from .gov:
>
> Here's the nice url for govuk:
>
> https://www.gov.uk/your-right-to-minimum-wage/work-experience-and-internships-paid-or-unpaid
>
> Here's the less pretty url from business link
>
> http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=1096704110&r.l1=1073858787&r.l2=1081657912&r.l3=1096697303&r.s=sc&type=RESOURCES
>
> --
> Chris Adams
> mobile: 07974 368 229
> twitter: @mrchrisadams
> www: chrisadams.me.uk
>
> On Friday, 1 June 2012 at 09:33, Murray Steele wrote:
>
> On 1 June 2012 09:24, Chris Adams <mail at chrisadams.me.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi guys,
>
> Apologies if this is off-topic. I'm totally happy to take this convo
> elsewhere if it's beyond the remit of LRUG here.
>
> I was at Silicon Milkroundabout last week, and I met a number of really
> bright young people who are either halfway through their degrees, or
> looking for internships to gain a degree of experience and exposure to
> working in a tech startup, rather than immediate employment (either they
> don't feel   inexperienced enough to apply for full-time positions, or they
> want to test the waters first).
>
> We've been looking at running an internship programme over here at AMEE,
> and while there's no shortage of practices to structure an internship
> around for interested young engineers (for example pairing exercises,
> seeing how releases are planned and features, and tracking deployment
> afterwards), but the main thing stopping us has been struggling to find
> specific guidance on how to do it *fairly*.
>
>
> We've run an intern program at Unboxed for the past 2 years and are doing
> it again this year, so I might be able to shed some light on what we've
> done (good and bad).  Before I do though, what exactly do you mean by
> "fairly"?
>
>
> Anyone here in small companies have run something similar successfully,
> with a specific tech/engineering focus here?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Chris
>
>
>
>
> --
> Chris Adams
> mobile: 07974 368 229
> twitter: @mrchrisadams
> www: chrisadams.me.uk
>
>
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