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Internships: Good for the Intern, Great for the Team by Lillie Chilen You might think that hiring interns is charity work. Your company is bringing on less-than-baked engineers and spending precious engineering resources to train them and bring them up to speed on your technologies. Surprise! Interns actually help your team, too. Running a successful internship program helps your team level up its teaching skills, discourages silos, and encourages writing maintainable code. I’ll talk about mistakes, successes, and specific processes to keep your team and interns productive, and you’ll leave this talk with plenty of fodder for hiring interns at your company. Help us caption & translate this video! http://amara.org/v/J48T/
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The video titled "Internships: Good for the Intern, Great for the Team" by Lillie Chilen at RailsConf 2016 discusses the significant benefits of running a successful internship program not only for interns but also for the overall team dynamics and productivity. Chilen emphasizes that interns are often misunderstood as mere charity hires but can actually contribute positively to a company's environment and performance. **Key points discussed in the video include:** - **Intern Experience and Guidance:** Chilen shares several anecdotes about different interns, highlighting how proper guidance or lack thereof can drastically affect their experience and contributions. For instance, the 'CS Hammer' intern who worked in isolation and produced unusable code taught the importance of integration and mentorship. - **Learning from Failure:** The story of an intern who created an unhelpful project but was eventually hired illustrates that even misguided projects can lead to positive outcomes if the intern is properly supported. - **Structuring the Internship Program:** The importance of having a well-structured program is stressed. Chilen outlines the stages of their internship at Omada: initial pairing, followed by solo projects, and then again pairing. This ensures interns receive adequate mentorship and experience hands-on work. - **Importance of Pair Programming:** Pair programming is highlighted as a critical practice for onboarding interns, allowing them to learn collaboratively while helping to reduce communication silos within teams. - **Code Reviews as Learning Tools:** Emphasizing the necessity of a strong code review culture, Chilen argues it provides vital feedback and encourages interns to ask questions that can reveal existing issues in the team’s processes and codebase. - **Diversity and Recruitment:** Chilen notes that internships can help diversify teams by reaching beyond traditional recruitment methods and providing opportunities for underrepresented groups in tech. - **Paying Interns:** It is emphasized that internships should be paid, as this fosters a fair exchange and reflects the value interns bring to the company. - **Auditing and Continuous Improvement:** The program serves as a mechanism for evaluating and improving team processes, as interns often highlight weaknesses that may have gone unnoticed. **Conclusions and Key Takeaways:** Chilen concludes that internships can be mutually beneficial if structured correctly, stressing that the focus should be on creating a nurturing environment for learning and contributing. A well-executed internship program not only enhances the intern experience but also leads to improved team performance and the development of better software.
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