How's This For an Internship?
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This year Fog Creek software hired some programming interns and wanted to use them to do productive work as well as give them real experience in the world. So the owner, Joel Spolsky, devised a project that they would work on to learn a few things about the real world. As opposed to doing busy work, which is what lots of interns seem to end up doing.
Well, it's almost complete and there was an update this week at the roughly halfway point. They're ready for a beta and if you're interested, you can apply. It's a neat idea and I applied. 🙂
I've been doing some writing (hopefully to be published soon) on hiring and retention and how you go about finding good DBAs, or just plain employees. This got me thinking that Joel's approach is a great idea. Not that everyone will get the best interns and be able to build a product they might sell, but using an alternative approach, giving some real experience and making it a desirable job does make more people apply and give you a better chance at finding someone that will be a good employee.
One of my friends has been looking at bringing in new people on a 1-2 month trial, especially out of town people, and seeing how they fit in, how things go, etc. Kind of an extended interview. I know I wish someone would have done that for me when I moved to Denver. I met some great people, but the job wasn't as advertised and I think 2 months might have clued me in to look for another job. As it was, I was looking at the 4 month period on my own.
Any other ideas out there for the average corporation? Need some summer help? What can you do to attract some interns and give them something to do, something to work on that they enjoy and will learn something from and which might benefit you. Maybe have them try to rewrite something old from scratch using knowledge of the current system? Maybe have them tackle some R&D project you've been wanting to work on?
I'm sure you guys and gals have some great ideas on this one.
Steve Jones
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I was reading the "update" and it brought back nostalgic memories of my first job which was in a small (really small) company of 25 people working on an e-commerce application - it brought home to me with a rush why telecommuting can be so very lonely and sometimes (dare I say it ?!) downright boring - I do miss all the comraderie, brainstorming and the sheer fun of teampower working towards a common goal!
At any rate, for your friend who's looking for ideas - I don't know if you ever got to "catch up" with reading posts after you returned from your vacation (somehow doubt it!) but I came across this great article on yahoo that I posted on "Anything but SQL"...
one of them is "....a Chicago Police Dept. crime Web site and Google Maps -- and lets you type in an address to see recent crimes nearby. The site attracted 1.2 million page views in just the first two weeks after it began in May..." - I remembered watching a show on TV just a few weeks ago where they were interviewing a woman in a "highly respectable neighbourhood" in CA who had 11 registered sex offenders living on her street alone & she didn't know until it was too late....I promptly went and entered my zip code in the National Registry and was horrified to discover that there were 5 registered offenders all within a couple of miles' radius!
Along the lines of the marriage between the Chicago Police and Google maps, we could have (eg.) one between real estate companies and the national registry of sex offenders - who wouldn't like to have information like that before buying a dream house costing a small (or large) fortune ?!
I'm sure when it comes to mash-ups there're no dearth of ideas out there...and if you come up with one that benefits the Community - that's about as good as it gets!
**ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI !!!**
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