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Onboarded my second intern/apprentice
I've always been very motivated to teach and mentor others. It also helps me stay accountable and plan the upcoming work better, and make a better use of my time. Also it's a great way to add consistency to my schedule and routine, since we meet at a specific time each workday.
This marks the onboarding of my second simultaneous intern/apprentice. Being now a team of 3, it's starting to feel like we are an actual company instead of just a couple of people building stuff.
My two interns are trained in programming, but are quite junior and inexperienced. Having more than a decade of software engineering experience, I'm happy to be able to contribute to their professional development and career by teaching them and putting them through the situations they need to face to grow and expand their skillset. Programming alone is not enough. AI is taking more of our programming tasks away, and young professionals need to have a wider range of skills including product strategy, design, marketing, and beyond.
So far I've been having to spend a lot of time teaching them and getting them up to speed, and we are far from done, but I can see their improvement day by day. Hopefully soon I'll be able to delegate more of the technical tasks to them, so I can spend more time on marketing and growth.
Would love to hear your perspectives. Have you hired any interns? Do you prefer working with more senior people? Does it pay off to spend so much time training junior people? Do you prefer to just work alone??
Let's discuss in the comments!
This marks the onboarding of my second simultaneous intern/apprentice. Being now a team of 3, it's starting to feel like we are an actual company instead of just a couple of people building stuff.
My two interns are trained in programming, but are quite junior and inexperienced. Having more than a decade of software engineering experience, I'm happy to be able to contribute to their professional development and career by teaching them and putting them through the situations they need to face to grow and expand their skillset. Programming alone is not enough. AI is taking more of our programming tasks away, and young professionals need to have a wider range of skills including product strategy, design, marketing, and beyond.
So far I've been having to spend a lot of time teaching them and getting them up to speed, and we are far from done, but I can see their improvement day by day. Hopefully soon I'll be able to delegate more of the technical tasks to them, so I can spend more time on marketing and growth.
Would love to hear your perspectives. Have you hired any interns? Do you prefer working with more senior people? Does it pay off to spend so much time training junior people? Do you prefer to just work alone??
Let's discuss in the comments!
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10+ YOE here and had many situations where I had to mentor and lead teams of engineers. Not at my own company (yet), but for multiple previous employers - one of which was a big tech co.
Interns are really hit or miss. There's a poor ROI associated as they can decide to not come back after the summer is done, and the typical intern cycle (3 months) is not enough for them to provide real value.
I mentored many different new hires at my last job (non-interns mostly). In my experience, you can tell if someone is going to work out within the first month - often the first day or two. Also, titles and raw years of experience don't count for a lot in my view. I mentored some new grads that were very sharp and picked up stuff faster than senior hires.
That said, it helps to create milestones for them to hit to CYA and create a paper trail in case you need to get rid of them. i.e. by week 1 they should have solved an easy bug and shipped it to prod. by month 1, they should have delivered K features in the codebase, by the end of 3 months they should be able to work completely independently. Or whatever you deem appropriate. Have checkins at each milestone to see how they're doing and consider weekly or biweekly 1-1 sessions.
In terms of how I prefer to work: I don't necessarily prefer to work alone, but hiring someone is a huge step that is not needed in the early stages of business where MRR is either inconsistent or less than, say, $10K/month. That's the stage I'm at.
I'll hire later, but it won't be a lot of people. I plan to maintain a small company of at most 5-10 employees. Any more than that will be something I'm not equipped to (or frankly want to) handle. I'll take the Netflix mindset of: only hire people that can execute independently, do not accept excuses, fire fast if it's not working out. People that know how to build are a joy to work with and I really like those types of teams, but if I have too many people to handheld it becomes a waste of time. Someone else can level them up, then they can work for me when they have enough experience to know what they're doing.
Thanks for your insight, a lot of good tips and perspectives that I will consider!
No problem!
I'm actually already struggling with some of what you mentioned. One of the interns has a way of thinking that is much more about intuition and guessing than actually reasoning through things. I've helped other people before to learn how to think and reason more, but it's a lot of work and the brain habit of guessing (usually guessing wrong) never really goes away fully. I'm not sure if it's worth the time and effort, or if maybe there is some different kind of work I can guide them towards.
Learning how to reason is tough. That’s something you either have or you don’t, or at the very least they should have learned it in university.
I would fire them and move on if they’re consistently just guessing and not able to think through a problem.
Being able to reason and think a few steps ahead is a requirement to write good software.