How Useful Are Interns?

I'm the founder of a seed-stage startup and need to expand the team (currently 5 people) — I'm considering hiring interns for growth, product, operations, and sales.

For those who have hired interns before (students / fresh grads), how do they compare to full-time hires, both in terms of output and time to productivity?

Do they produce quality work (in their first few months), or are they mostly for a talent pipeline? How much autonomy can I give them and how hands on do I have to be with onboarding / continuous coaching?

Cheers all for the thoughts :)

reify · a year ago

To be absolutely honest, you cannot be for real to expect an undergraduate or even someone in the second/final year of their masters degree to join the firm and hit the ground running or even compare them with your full time experienced employees who have most probably had years of experience under their belts.

It seems that what you needs is a team of fully trained, highly educated robots.

I managed the interships and volunteers for a UK national charity.

How do students and trainees compare to full time staff? Clearly they are students and trainees usually with no onsite experience, so in my experince many years behind your full time staff experience.

Do they produce quality work in the first few months? Depends on the intern and whether or not you set them up to fail and what the meaning of quality work means.

Interns only have an academic experience of their chosen field not an onsite profit driven or anxiety provoking environment.

It takes time for interns to blossom

harry314 · a year ago

What I've seen generally, is interns being given non-essential non-time sensitive tasks that will help them grow, and depending on how they do and how they approach the task, they may get a position offer near the end of their internship.

So far I have not seen interns expected to do real, important work.

That being said, I'm in the EU, so things might be different where you are located.

siberpunk · a year ago

They are actually not that -- useful. When I was an intern at the company I am currently working at, I remember the first pull request I opened. This was 2 years ago and my PR was still open, until recently closed without merge.. Onboarding process takes time even for experienced developers, and experience of most students/new grads is highly limited both in programming and team work. You might want to consider the output you need is not just good code.

With all these being said, hiring interns to get them ready to work for you is a good idea. That's what happened to me, and what I do right now. While we are giving students an opportunity to involve in a real company which benefits them, we also direct them into learning our tech stack and conventions, which might benefit us in the future. Your resources (money and time) is used like a future investment in this case

drfunk · a year ago

Mostly good for talent pipeline imo. I try to look for curiosity and autonomy when interviewing prospective interns. That way I can let them explore cool topics that we don't have the bandwidth for. Bear in mind that (at least where I'm located) they are still students / in the middle of their training. They require more supervision than new employees. I consider this to be a plus, for instance if you want one of your team member to level up in coaching/management skills.

ingonealan3 · a year ago

It varies wildly. In my experience, for a small company with limited resources, they are often more a burden than a boon. It is a good way, though, of finding worthwhile candidates to hire. Unfortunately, that tends to happen quite rarely.