What common pet peeves do experienced developers have when working with interns?
If you’re starting a CS internship soon, you might be wondering what seasoned devs find annoying about working with interns. It could be insightful to hear from devs who have experience working with interns about common mistakes they make. By learning what not to do, incoming interns can enhance their experience and performance in the workplace.
### Why Ask About Annoyances?
– Importance of learning from others’ experiences
– Enhancing professional growth by avoiding common pitfalls
### Experienced Developers’ Perspectives
– Valuable insights for interns starting their journey
– Real-world examples to guide new interns
#CSinternship #developers #advice #careeradvice #softwareengineering #internshipadvice
Not asking questions and getting stuck OR asking questions that can be easily googled
First, try to resolve the issue yourself. If you get stuck after 30 min – an hour or if it’s some company / codebase specific thing, just ask
I know of some interns who have gotten fired:
* Medium sized company, 4 months in. EVP overheard them say “I could work here for a decade and still have no idea what we do lol”. Short investigation revealed they didn’t do anything
* Big company, 3 months in. Masters student used the nap room everyday. Got transferred between a few teams before getting fired
* Small company, a few weeks in. Intern showed up and left on their own times
For the most part, as long as you make an effort to learn and contribute, there is nothing to worry about. Your full time peers expect you to be bad, but not arrogant or super lazy
I had a team lead/mentor at my first job that was a very helpful and patient man. Only time I ever saw him lose his patience was with an intern. He would explain how something should be done and the intern would argue. All the time.
You’re there to learn, so learn. Don’t waste time arguing minutiae with devs that have 20 years of experience when you are still in school.
1. Being an asshole
2. Poor work ethic
3. Lacking openmindedness or curiosity
Probably in that order.
>”Thanks for the advice, but I plugged it into ChatGPT and it told me to do this. Oh, by the way you can get around the company ChatGPT firewall by doing…”
I gave an intern a task that was open ended with a number of ways to solve it. My intention was for it to be a small contained interesting fun problem that they could do, with the ultimate goal of them learning about the topic. My goal wasn’t for them to solve the problem, it was for them to learn. And they had a solution that worked, but they didn’t understand anything about it or why it worked. So they were able to solve the problem without learning. That was the most taken aback I’ve ever been. Really opened my eyes to how things are changing.
In my experience no one really expects anything from interns. If considering the time I sink into helping you, things come out as a wash in productivity, that’s a win in my book. Don’t worry so much about your productivity so much.
If your mentor is good, make sure to tell his/her boss that they are doing a good job and you appreciate it. In my experience people mentoring still have to do all of their normal duties, so it can kinda be like charity for the person mentoring, taking out of time they have away from work. If they are doing that, then mentoring likely means something to them. Just like you want to do a good job, some mentors want to do a good job as well (not all). To move up in a corporate ladder you need to start overseeing things, and if someone is applying for a promotion in the future, their experience of mentoring is likely something that they would use to argue that they are fulfilling those types of roles. So if you think they are doing a good job, let their boss know because for some people it actually could be something that’s beneficial to them.
Not asking questions because I look busy.
I get it you don’t want to disturb me, but when I tell them that they can ask me questions any time I really mean it. I had a shit internship experience back in the day and now I always make sure to be available to interns. I’ll even make it a point to check in with them twice a day. Once in the morning and again before they leave for the day.
This applies to everyone and anyone in any occupation. Stop being unpredictable and BE a predictable person. I’m not saying don’t think out of box or don’t break status quo. But don’t be unpredictable pos that does stuff without telling anyone.
I had one intern I was responsible for mentoring who was assigned a small project to complete during her 3-month internship. She came from a great school and our company was prestigious, so I figured she’d be super motivated.
Week after week goes by and she gives me the same excuse about her getting started. Then she goes on some kind of trip with her friends to a rave or some week long event. It’s been a month at this point with no progress.
At this point I’m starting to get worried because her failure is going to make me look bad too, plus it’s my responsibility to mentor her. I kept asking about her progress and she’d give me vague answers. This went on for another 2 weeks, and at this point we have 1.5 months left.
I finally just sat down with her and asked her to show me what she had. She hesitated but finally showed me… Nothing. She’d done basically nothing in her 1.5 months. She was super embarrassed and I’m pretty sure she was about to cry.
Asked her what was going on and it turns out she just didn’t even know where to start, and I guess that as time went on she was afraid to show that she had no progress which created a bad cycle.
I told her I’d help her and we’d get this working. We started spending like 3-4 hours together every day side by side pair programming. Later I’d do my work right next to her and answer her questions. We were basically glued to each other, we’d even leave for lunch together lol. After like 2 more weeks she had it down and knew exactly what to do and how to learn what she didn’t know. She ended up completing the project and leaving a good impression.
Anyway lesson there I guess is don’t procrastinate, and also your mentor is a mentor for a reason. She ended up completing the project and
same applies to new junior employees.
-Ask questions but try googling on your own first.
-Don’t rush through tasks to impress me…Speed matters not at this pt, accuracy and understanding matter most.
-don’t just jump at low level bug tickets, take the initiative and work on something you can sink your teeth into that will sorta span a few knowledge areas.
Asking vague questions — don’t send me vague screenshots with only half the logs and expect me to know what’s wrong
If you run into an issue, share all relevant details (log files, set up/environment details, the command you ran) when you ask for help. Be as specific as you can. It takes 2 times longer to debug if I have to pull all the details out of you
Read the documentation first, then look at stackoverflow and ChatGPT. Try solving it on your own first. Then you can ask for help.
Don’t ask for help as the first thing you do is
The key with being an intern is learning HOW to ask questions. Approach people with “I searched the documentation, I made an attempt, and I’m still not sure.” Now, some people will still be ass holes about it – the industry is riddled with those types of people. However, the key is to seek out the people willing to help and gather feedback from them. Always try to improve. If you can do that some will respect you. And finally, don’t forget that this is an internship – you won’t work with these people for a long time so be prepared to build relationships with the people that matter most for YOUR career.
The last time we had an intern, his mother called me because I yelled at him. No one talks to her baby that way!
Asshole deleted a quarter’s worth of work in our servicenow instance. He’s lucky all he got was chewed out.
I have limited interaction with interns the last one I had was an excellent worker and learner and I can’t complain. But I did have the opportunity of working with some of them on a project and the thing that stood out the most is they weren’t self starters, they need a lot of hand holding usually.. and then the work they did didn’t really work very well and I had to fix it. But I suppose that’s par for the course.
Oh this one stands out as being particularly annoying. This fresh graduate comes in to intern with us (software engineering) and one of the first things he does outside of obnoxiously customizing his work computer was to start complaining about in place infra and legacy code saying it isn’t done right XYZ and we’re like. “Well. Yea. But that’s how it is and it currently works and supports the customers we have.” It’s like they have no concept of budgets and company goals and that in real life idealisms aren’t valuable if things are already made and there isn’t priority or budget to remake stuff that may not be perfect but works fine
I’m leading a team of interns while also working on other projects and this post has honestly made me feel bad about myself. I’m very patient with them and I’m 100% available for any of their questions – however, there is one intern I’ve just started ignoring on teams. They spam me with every cool thing they find about C#, or they pick apart a built-in function and tries to explain why it’s built poorly (it’s not, they just don’t understand the documentation)
How do you guys deal with these people aside from directly telling them they’re being annoying? I love that they’re learning and getting excited about code, but I’ve got my own projects, I don’t have time to read 7 paragraphs explaining C# to me.
If you show up (or are available if WFH) and are around for the entire time, you’re already part way there.
Second up – get some work done and show some progression. Be receptive if feedback and ask questions.
I generally expect very little from 4 month interns. 12 and 16 month are useful. First 4 is getting up to speed. The second 4 is getting productive; last 4, they are basically juniors.
After a year they normally have enough confidence and knowledge to question some of the more ridiculous requests.
…
For larger teams I expect some of the “senior” interns to help onboard the newbies. It is very handy to be familiar with the initial growing pains when explaining things.
I know this thread has a lot of comment already. But there is one thing that’s been bugging me. At what point do you ask your senior? And what is the right question here?
You see, it might be the lack of knowledge on my part too, but i never had a ‘right’ question to ask my senior. Every question is a question i can google. Or question i can use ChatGPT to frame me what to search for, then search Google with their answer. It might be 3 minutes to 3 hours but eventually i get all the answer from Google.
This become an issue as apparently my senior review me as lacking in communication and want me to work on it. But i just don’t have the right question that i feel like he can answer me (and most of my work is 90% Frontend while he handling 90% Backend). This haven’t affected me in the long run though everytime i break something in backend he will make sure i really know about it.
The best interns I’ve had would ask questions when they were stuck, would be appreciative of the help, would ask for and take feedback seriously. The worst seemed to resent their hosts, thought they knew better, and would either not ask for help or ask without having done the preliminary work themselves.
They ask too much questions. You give them the job but still get it done yourself.
One annoying thing I’m dealing with right now is that he’s just waaay to over motivated. Even if told he should focus on finishing one task a day, he’s wildly jumping between tickets, half assign and not really testing anything and then gets 5+ tickets back the next day.
I understand a lot of domain knowledge is needed to test the things correctly, but it’s provided to him and he should ask if more info is needed.
It’s like I ask him to pick up a flow from the forest and he goes in with a chainsaw and brings a few tree lodges.
Host of the time I end up reverting so much that didn’t even need to be changed.
Strong opinions on silly things.
I dont need IDE
I dont need debugger
I can code with notepad
bulk replace occurrences in code base without checking
fixated on things they learn on tutorial and refuse to understand use case and tradeoff
Mouthy about their religious convictions.
Overly flattering to the CEO.
And all when it’s completely unfounded.