Monday, April 17, 2006

One Intern, Two Intern... Red Intern, Blue Intern...

As you can see from the title of this post, I'm going to talk about interns.  Part of the overall plan of "DevCo" going forward is to create a new environment and culture.  This includes providing a formal mechanism to bring in new, fresh talent to the team.  One of the most effective ways to do this is through an internship program.  This allows university students to obtain key skills and experience in an actual work environment.  It is also a way for the company to evaluate the performance of the interns and based on how well they do, the company can optionally offer them a full-time position.  This is typically after they've graduated.

Interns can bring in fresh ideas and perspectives so there are things the company (empoyees) can learn from them.  Likewise, the intern can learn from the more experienced and "battle hardened" engineering teams.  In fact, it is an extremely honorable thing to impart your experience and knowledge to the next wave of fresh talent.  Part of the goal of a formal internship program is to make sure the intern is matched up with the proper senior engineer.  They would form a, kind of, mentor/apprentice relationship.  As I begin to formalize the details on program, I'll try and post more details.  The good news is that we've gotten approvals from the "DevCo" board to open up a decent number of part-time internship requisitions.  Most of these will be filled from local universities and colleges.  I'll try and post the job descriptions and requirements as they become available.

9 comments:

  1. From there to here,

    from here to there,

    funny interns

    are everywhere.

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  2. Allen, these little bits of info really inspire faith in that things Delphi will actually work out well in the end.


    However, all this info requires time to punch into your blog and I'd really like to be doing more Delphi!

    So get back to coding; Don't make me come up there!


    PS. If possible, balance the workload like this: 10% Dotnet2 syntactic sugary thingies that we haven't needed all this time, 90% native x64 bit Delphi.

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  3. Interns are great ideas.. just a shame I cant be 1!(PS I think for the first time the pic of your office has the light on when Ive been here!)

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  4. I made several interships in the industry during my studies. Working on a project where various interns previously worked on is a nightmare: each intern had had his own educational cursus and his own way for writing code.

    How long will these internships last?

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  5. You paint your interns? What a great way to tell them apart!

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  6. Allen, Write Scott Adams. I hear Asok is looking for a new internship ;)

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  7. Will young programmers from others countries be able to be hired and move to USA to work at borland as an intern?

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  8. Daniel,


    That is possible, yes. There will be some visa/immigration issues we'd have to wrestle with, but nothing outside the realm of possibility. However, I would caution you that these positions are part-time.

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  9. Allen,


    the more I hear you talk about DevCo, the more impressed I am, and the more excited I am for you guys.


    One of the best things about Borland when I started was the intern-support-engineering promotion track which seems to have faded sometime in the late 1990s. Recreating an internship program centered in the engineering group sounds like a fantastic way to both bring new blood into the team and to impart the team's engineering wisdom on young engineers who can take that wisdom elsewhere.


    This is a wonderful proposal, and it is a very good sign that the people running the show in DevCo are committed to making DevCo a fantastic operation.

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