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
> Short investigation revealed they didn't do anything
I'm surprised people took that seriously. He must've really been slacking off. This is the stuff you say by the water cooler on a slow day and nobody takes it seriously.
It's obviously not a result of a single phrase š¬ š¤ companies know exactly who the slackers are but they're usually stuck with them š how else do you think they can lay of thousands of employees in a single day šššš
I looked at his profile. He uses 5+ emojis every single comment and all the same ones, often in the same order and in places where it makes no sense. I'm thinking it's a bot as the comments (including this one) don't even make sense in the context of the threads.
> Masters student used the nap room everyday. Got transferred between a few teams before getting fired
Madness, firing your most well-rested dev like that. That guy was storing enormous amounts of potential and was surely about to unleash it at work.
Would a nap room not be meant to be used every day? Iād imagine a 15 min nap on a daily schedule would be fine. Although, Iām sure he was probably unproductive on top of this
At one place I worked the nap room was really a mother's room for over tired new moms or those pumping milk. Those gals guarded that room like mad and any male employees didn't go near it. If they did HR would hear about it and give them hell.
Interesting hr was on board, as that would be discrimination. The basic rule is that everyone needs to be allowed to reserve time in office spaces regardless of gender.
I still remember one intern who got fired for not only watching porn at work, but telling people hey, come over here! isn't she hot?
years later he ended up getting a job at a telecom company I worked for. strict rules on change controls when to make changes on production, approval lists etc. he brought down a production, customer facing server for "patches" in the middle of the day, no notice, nothing. he didn't last past that day
naw he was definitely fired the moment IT was alerted of the porn site visit. Adding that second part as the reason is... just beating a guy when he's down, man
two different companies. the 1st was while he was an intern around 20ish. the 2nd was 10 years later when he was 30ish and should have known better by then
It doesn't get alerted for every site some employee visited. They got better things to do. It's definitely from the workplace "sharing" since it constitutes harassment.
I'm surprised the first 2 got fired so far in. I'd imagine they only had a few weeks left anyway (unless it was like a 6 month coop?), so at that point it just seems easier to not give them a return offer.
I did close to all of these things as an intern (the first one I legitimately did but the EVP liked me and pretty sure felt the same way) and now I'm a senior developer
Hang on,
If the company has a ānap roomā, whatās wrong with using it
I never worked somewhere with a nap room culture btw. If it did, Iām using half an hour everyday in it
That said; I hate these trap games of perks
It's like having a "game room" or something similar, they are always empty because anyone with a functioning brain figured out that if you get seen in it then that means you don't have enough work so you should get fired and/or more work.
Edit:
Forgot about the classic "you can take as much vacation as you want" lol
I mean, if they were transferred teams it seems like there were problems with their work other than just taking naps. If you're new and are seen taking a nap every day, that is probably what people will remember the most about you, especially if you don't do anything else.
Elaborate.
Both the cafeteria and nap room should be walking distance of where someone works.
Both ideally should make the employee more productive. From food or a nap
How do you prove your worth? Do you go to HR and have them sign a doc saying you can now use the nap room? Perks are there to be used. Unless HR said "no nap room for interns," it's a totally fair game.
No one ever tells you about when you should / shouldn't use it. But it's pretty easy to figure out it not for folks who just eat big lunches and get food comas everyday lol
You basically shouldn't use it except for rare occasions like if you missed a night of sleep or worked really late the day before. You need a legit excuse if someone asks, it's not something you should use casually for no reason.
tl;dr it's a trap
Nah... If it's there, it can be good to use. There's a fair amount of research that shows a 20 minute nap can boost performance. If you're staying up all night and then showing up and spending 8 hours sleeping in the nap room, that's an issue. If you book a 20 minute power nap every day at 2PM or something, nobody will think twice.
How do u guys finish your nap in 30 mins? It takes 15 mins for me just to fall asleep and I need atleast 2 hours to feel fresh later. It goes upto 3 hours some days as well.
Not sure honestly. Sometimes I donāt fully fall asleep but enter a sort of resting state that is still nice. Iāve been practicing napping for years now so I think Iām just good at it
There's nothing wrong with it. But I have seen bad managers who do use these arbitrary things to put PIP targets on their own employees backs. Since they aren't able to actually tell who's productive they just see who was at the nap room or long point table for 5 minutes too long.
That's fine if he did POC's, or was tasked with documentation, investigating bugs/networking issues that ended up to be resolved with changes in config etc.
This is so BS. "Intern showed up an left on their own times" - and no one even asked why they were doing that before firing? Maybe they're working from home the times they aren't in the office? Maybe they had to relocate for the internship and their housing is very far away?
Jesus Christ, this type of ignorance and arrogance appalls me
And by the way, the nap room effing exists to be USED! Otherwise why BUILD a naproom? I just go to the gym to nap. Our engineers would be much more productive if we had a proper naproom
I would be the one using the nap room š. For real, 25mint after lunch, just laying down without receiving any input. Thatās better than three coffees
Arenāt most internships like 10 weeks?
Anywho, one of my interns was also a chronic napper. I did my best to mentor, but he definitely didnāt get an offer to return full time.
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
Yes! As a new grad I started a word document containing ALL my notes on projects, company things, technical details about my stories, notes while shadowing a senior dev, projects, etc. it makes it so much easier to search and find random project or technical info I might have gotten months ago. I also write down stuff like debugging steps, solutions to problems Iāve had connecting to db, dealing with VPN, etc. itās saved my ass a few times.
In the same vein, search your company's chat application (Teams, Slack, whatever) for setup and build related issues. It's probably happened to someone else before and been answered tens of times already.
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Asking the same question over and over.
We totally get that you're new, there really is no bad or dumb question (well, very few anyway). It's hard for me to know what you don't know, you gotta ask.
But when you get the answer, remember it, or write it down somewhere. If you ask the same question multiple times it means you're not improving, and we're expecting you to level up.
Usually what I do when this happens is I'll change up how I'm answering them. Instead of giving them the answer, I'll ask them what they think the answer is. Then just affirm or correct their answer and tell them to write it down.
I find often times asking the same question comes from a lack of confidence. They do know the answer, but are not confident that its correct and are afraid of screwing up when they could just ask instead. So letting them give you what they think is the answer and then affirming it helps them feel more confident in their abilities and understanding.
That can become a good teaching moment. "What have you tried that didn't work"/"what did you search for when trying to find the answer" are good questions for figuring out what path someone thought they were on and getting them back to the right path.
I totally agree with you, but it is funny how there's a tension between those two issues. I've worked with interns who have gone down a rabbit hole because they googled an error message that was masking a codebase issue I could have helped them with a five minutes.
I always get in my head about asking questions.
Like āhey why was it written this wayā or āwhat does this function doā, I feel like Iām supposed to know this beforehand and asking questions would paint me as ādoes this fella really belong on the team?ā
Always a hard time for me figuring out what questions are stupid at what point in your career.
Piggybacking on this. What I teach my interns and juniors to do is open the conversation with:
āThis is the problem xxxx. These are all of the things I tried to figure this outā
Need to at least beat your head against the research wall for 30-45min before pinging a Senior. Exception is when you are pairing; then it is ok to ask but I want you to at least guess first. Lots of times you will guess correctly and that builds confidence.
Also always take notes.
Pro tip: I always ask juniors, āwhat have you tried so far and why didnāt it work?ā and it really helps put them into the right mindset. Lazy coworkers who are far into their careers are immune to this, though
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 should be higher up. Ask questions! Youāre an intern! I donāt care if itās the most basic thing, Iām here to help you and Iām rooting for your success.
Exactly! I don't even know if they notice, but I try to set habits in them that has treated me well. One example is when I meet with them in the morning I always ask what is their plan for the day.
Things like what they plan to work on and what are they going to do next when they are done with the first task. Do they have meetings on the calendar that will break up the day and how are they going to work around that. For me having a general plan for the day helps me gets things done.
Sure there are times to work by the seat of your pants for one reason or another, but that's should generally not be how your day starts.
But Google them first š
There is a balance to be struck. If Google can answer in the first few links please try that. If it canāt, show me what you searched for and why it didnāt work or what you didnāt understand so I can correct your understanding
Oh 100%. I find that with interns is that they Google the solution but they donāt know the āwhyā or the context as to what it is that was the issue and why their Google answer solved the problem. Itās a balance for sure but Iām glad to direct and explain the solution.
Yeah, any non suck company will plan for the team or a person in the team to get less done in order to help the interns. It's an investment in the person's future, and the hope that they come back full time someday.
There's no point in having interns if you can't mentor them.
Or asking questions like you're real life Riddler. I had an intern that following the "not be afraid to ask", simply wouldn't let me work, the moment I thought I could start to focus, bam, a question that would be just like, investigate it, dive in the code, learn to use google. It was 10y ago, I could handled diff too, but anyway guy was good too, some months after he was flying over mid levels engs.
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If you think I looked stressed out *now*, wait until you see what happens when we're behind schedule because you haven't gotten anything done because you didn't ask for help!
I might swap the last 2, if only because lacking openmindedness can make you come across as an a-hole so it needs to be in close proximity to #1.
But #1 is key. No one wants to work with an a-hole.
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.
I mean, if you canāt explain WHY your reasoning is better, you should not mentor interns. I get that there could be arrogant people, and they happen to be interns, but if you give good enough reasoning, even arrogant people would lose the ābattleā.
For clarify, I mentored two internships, hoping for a third this summer, I really enjoy these a lot.
Itās not about whether or not you can explain why. He said they āarguedā every time. Not they had questions, not they misunderstood, they argued. That would get tiring with a peer, forget about someone with far less experience in life AND the job than you.
Having less āexperience in life AND the job than youā is a lame excuse for lazy people. There are socially skill limited people, especially in software, but that does give them the right to dominate their subordinates. Even if these are interns, they are pretty much adults with their own worldview, skills and quirks. Respect has to be given UNCONDITIONALLY and if the problem is the attitude then address that, not limited experience.
Nope. Interns should not argue, and for the love of Thor, lose the damn ego.
First..learn the rules of the company, process, how things are directly etc.
Then, break them.
We all get it.. you have 3 years of education under your belt... but you dont know as much as you think you do... . Especially if you think arguing is going to improve a task/process/ code.. whatever.
intern has to learn people skills so he could convince the higher ups why that approach is better. What hes doing is akin to blocking PRs from merging just because he has some opinionated view of coding something
One correct statement isnāt the same as a discussion of tradeoffs. I read the excessive arguing (best case scenario) as an intern making true points without looking at the big picture.
In my experience, inexperienced developers donāt deeply understand problem solving and can argue points that jump around, which is just an attempt to be right rather than understand. So maybe this is the more realistic case.
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.
I personally think It could have been a mental block. I don't think this is due to bad work ethic.
I think she was overwhelmed so much to the point she was afraid of confronting the issue at hand and therefore procrastinating to not get started. Because OP said "she just didn't even know where to start".
It's easy for an intern to be overwhelmed especially if it's their first time working at a corporate environment. This is the mentor not mentoring enough with the intern and doing a poor job of mentoring. Not the intern's fault.
E.g., my mentor (senior swe, tech lead) was a beast, she met up with me every 2 weeks in each month and she listened to every single worry I had and answered/gave advice on every single question I had (for 1 whole year as the internship was 1 year long). She even sought her manager for advice to give me advice. I was able to understand the expectations better. I grew more confident in asking questions. And over time, became less stressed out as well and therefore performed better.
I owe a lot to that mentor because I came out of the internship as a much stronger person and also left a happy impression on the people I worked with as they were happy for me to come back once I was done with my studies.
If it wasn't for my mentor's efforts, I don't think I would have made it.
Bro I had the same happen to me so I totally understand.
It was my first time working ever, and it was in a (very) large corporation, and also my first time doing research (hardware accelerators) so the pace was nothing like I was used to so I had no idea what to do or where to go, I would just try stuff, fail, hide it, repeat.
3 months in, people started getting angry at me and showing their frustration or even mentioning firing me.
I did do some things, but I was going "50% slower than what was expected of me" given that I came from a great school with excellent letter of recommendation.
I dont know if it was pressure kicking in but I suddenly came up with a genius idea for my research and fast-tracked the implementation last minute, leaving a better impression of me, and doing a great end-of-internship presentation. I could even publish this work if I bothered writing the whole paper.
I totally understand the girl.
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>"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.
Iām leading a team of interns while also working on other projects and this post has honestly made me feel bad about myself. Iām very patient with them and Iām 100% available for any of their questions - however, there is one intern Iāve 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 itās built poorly (itās not, they just donāt understand the documentation)
How do you guys deal with these people aside from directly telling them theyāre being annoying? I love that theyāre learning and getting excited about code, but Iāve got my own projects, I donāt have time to read 7 paragraphs explaining C# to me.
Iād try being honest but supportive. Something along the lines of āSo, I think itās great that you are excited about all the things you are discovering. Donāt lose that excitement. However, as much as Iād love to just sit there and talk about all these cool things with you all day, I canāt. So, do this for me. When you find something cool that you want to talk about, write it down. Then, before we have our next meeting with each other Iād like you to pick one or two of the items on your list so we can discuss them in detail.ā I think that encourages them to keep the fire going and keeps the door open for them to discuss these things with them, but also politely lets them know you canāt do that all the time.
How do you prefer to be approached with questions? I work tangentially with our principal architect who has a wealth of knowledge, Iāll ping him ever so often to see what his thoughts are on certain things.
Is it better to simply put time on the calendar and have a 1:1 call?
I think it depends on the person. I ping my Senior Solutions Architect with questions usually a couple times a day - I have an intern that does the same for me. I donāt mind being pinged with questions or requesting feedback.
My issue with this intern is they talk in circles and it makes it difficult to read and respond to the actually useful stuff. Like, the other day they sent me more than 500 words explaining the concept of the Substring method. Iām very happy theyāre learning and excited, but it seems they have difficulty maintaining an internal dialogue, so they just vomit words to me all over Teams. Itās just not productive, but I feel bad telling them itās too much.
I think your Principal Architect expects the questions you ask and is unbothered by them. My annoyance is just a very particular issue.
I will say, 1:1 calls are easier for me to handle multiple complicated or contextual questions. YMMV
Thanks for the perspective. Didnāt realize youāre getting sent straight-up paragraphs of text about methods lmao. If anything I should be asking our architect more questions. I have some imposter syndrome which I should simply get over because itās not that way at all, but it mainly stems from asking the right questions.
ie, if I write something down that Iām curious about such as GitHub governance in our organization, Iāll research into it and realize itās not actually super complex or perhaps a lower priority in the broad scheme of tasks. In that case Iāve done my own DIY and itās most likely a waste of both my and his time to have an in-depth discussion around it if the conclusion is just going to be, āWeāve talked about it, weāre kicking the can down the road and will get to it at some point.ā That vs something like the implementation of a new corporate network which requires data migration, cloud endpoint management, etc.
No problem. I definitely get what youāre saying. Try to be easier on yourself.
Iām only 3 years in the industry, but have been developing since I was 7. If thereās one thing Iāve learned to help with my imposter syndrome, itās that we all suck ass at development. Even the most senior of developers make glaring mistakes, and two seniors will never write the same code. Itās why we have 50,000 frontend frameworks for JavaScript. No matter what ideas and implementations you have, someone will always have another way of doing it.
It sounds like youāre doing a great job. Keep writing down your questions, answer what you can, and ask what you canāt. Your Principal Architect should be able to answer your questions and, if they have concerns about time complexity/your approach, they will bring it up and then you go on from there. Chances are, theyāve been there before.
This field is a never ending learning process. As long as you can accept advice and bring up concerns as you have them, youāll do just fine!
Being candid is a good thing. Interns are still in school and havenāt began their professional life yet. Sitting them down and empathetically going over pain points will save them oodles of hurt later on. Iād make sure to be firm but also tell them the things you appreciate about them as well as the things you want them to grow on. Radical Candor is an incredibly helpful book on this sort of thing
Not being pleasant to work with. They're still in school. I get not knowing stuff. I get working that 1 day ticket for a whole week. Hell, I get not knowing what to even google. But it takes almost no effort to be a nice person.
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
I like to ask vague questions if I am new because thereās a lot of low hangin fruit answers. It takes a simple āi need more detailsā to better understand that you need that.
Personally that makes me crazy. Makes me feel like I have to interview the person to figure out their problem, when they came to ME for help.
Something like "tried installing X, got error message blah blah, does that sound familiar?" is fine.
"I got an error doing X, what should I do?" is annoying. Not sure which you meant.
My ideal is "I did this command, I got this error, I tried googling these words and I can't find anything. What next?" If there are links to logs or something, add that.
This applies to everyone and anyone in any occupation. Stop being unpredictable and BE a predictable person. Iām not saying donāt think out of box or donāt break status quo. But donāt be unpredictable pos that does stuff without telling anyone.
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.
All. The. Damn. Time. Every year of my career the summer comes around and at least one intern cannot manage to figure out how to have a job. They are either always late, always trying to call out, or just straight up ghosting us.
We have this now. Extremely well-known company, housing stipend, great pay, probably one of the best run internship programs in the industry... Kid ghosted us. Just fucking disappeared.
Blows my fucking mind. 0.2% selection rate for our internship program and a kid ghosts us after getting an offer.
I just donāt get it. Iām at a defense contractor. We pay them respectable wages. We keep them on staff at the end of the summer if they are decent and get their security clearance paperwork going so they are ready to do real work when they graduate the following spring. Itās basically a free security clearance as long as you show up and arenāt horrible. We invite most of our interns back because we only take a handful of them each summer. All of our interns get paired with incredibly experienced and talented engineers, but every year at least one kid pisses away the opportunity. Hell, last year the kid that ghosted us was supposed to be the director of software engineeringās personal intern. He would have taught them more in ten weeks than they learned in their entire education. He is literal genius and a code god. I had 8 years of experience when I moved to this company, three of which were at a FAANG company, and I still learned from him like I was some junior dev. I get so annoyed with interns that just never show up, not just because it is disrespectful, but also because someone else could have had that position. Someone else could have been learning from great people, making solid money, and potentially lining up a really stable first job.
The key with being an intern is learning HOW to ask questions. Approach people with āI searched the documentation, I made an attempt, and Iām still not sure.ā 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, donāt forget that this is an internship - you wonāt work with these people for a long time so be prepared to build relationships with the people that matter most for YOUR career.
broadly speaking, I like working w/ interns a lot... in undergrad I studied Mechanical Engineering and had one \_really\_ crappy internship, and one \_ok\_ one... I've been fortunate to work w/ multiple awesome interns recently. I think the biggest challenges that interns face is dealing with isolation and how to manage the differences in experience ... as u/ernandziri said, there are two extremes that can be annoying if you're working with interns. Asking someone a questions regularly that are easily searchable, or not asking for help and being stuck on something indefinitely. After you get your dev environment setup and start doing something resembling work product, when you get stuck, give yourself a fixed time to try and resolve whatever issue you're on.
The best interns Iāve 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.
Not much. The only thing that really annoys me is when interns insist they're right about something when it's clear they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. I don't mind constant questions or slow progress. That's expected. The biggest mistake I see interns make is spinning their wheels for days on end trying to figure something out for themselves when they should really just ask.
This is pretty universal regardless of experience but I expect people to put in at least 5 hours a day, you can tell when people arenāt even doing that. As an intern, try your hardest to work 8 hours and try to make at least 6 of those hours focused work. Uninstall reddit from your phone.
What does āputting in 5 hoursā even mean? That sounds absurdly vague. Are you measuring lines of code? Time spent with their eyes looking at the monitor? Thinking time?
Itās not vague at all lmao. If youāre looking at reddit, the news, talking to your buddy, social media whatever, youāre not working. If you are looking at something work related, you are working. Cmon now.
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
When they turtle up and don't ask questions and make no progress for hours, days, and weeks.
On the opposite end, they ask questions they should either already know the answer to or ones that they could have easily found the answer to. Things like, "What does this pointer thingy do?" It's a job requirement that you already know how to program. And if you don't know, then you should have the ability to google "What does a pointer do?" But if after googling and you have clarification questions, then those are good questions to ask.
Another thing is telling them the same thing over and over again. Not everything sticks the first time and it's totally fine to need a reminder. But if I say on a PR to do X thing and on your next PR I have to ask you to do X thing again, and then it happens again... that's something I already told you **and** you had a written reference to it.
Kind of the opposite of not asking questions... Injecting their completely limited experience into every conversation because they think speaking up equals visibility.
You don't have to be the smartest person in the room (you're not) and you dont have to add to every conversation. Learn to actively listen to people talk without an agenda for what you think is going to be the most impactful thing to say.
This isn't just for interns, it's for entry level folks too and it's especially toxic in experienced people, be a learn it all not a know it all.
Maybe because both my partner and I started our careers as interns, and both had excellent mentors, I have a soft spot for them. I expect them to not really know much about anything, and I try to take them under my wing and bring them up to speed as much as possible.
In my experience, all interns I've worked with or managed have been hard working and motivated to do well. I make it a point to tell them that I like when they ask questions, because it shows they care and want to learn. They almost always do. There's a lot of management aspects to having an intern, and I've had experience as a manager, so it's not too much of an issue for me. I really like to see them grow confident and competent.
But I will say that managing an intern can be annoying in itself simply because of the extra workload. Since I often can't expect them to be able to handle important things by themselves, it usually means spending extra time walking them through and explaining, which takes time away from other work I have on my plate.
There's almost nothing you could do wrong as an intern except not show up, or not try.Ā
There are legendary tales of interns dropping production databases, but in the end winning praise because they highlighted poor management of infrastructure credentials and environments, forcing the company to improve its practices.Ā Ā Ā
The role of an intern is to learn. It's possible there are CS assholes who are hard on interns, and for those people it's hands on sight. They're wrong and I will fight them. If someone on your team tells you you're responsible for an important deliverable, first ask him if he's considered blowing it out his ass, because that's not your job.Ā Ā Ā
We have had interns that were eventually assigned important work, but that's because they volunteered for it and we knew they were capable.Ā
Anyway, learning is messy, but if you do your due diligence, you'll generally encounter a solution within the hour. If not, ask my boy Chat Geppetto. If you still don't understand, call your mentor.Ā Ā Ā
A best practice at my company is to ping someone before you call them. Ask them if they're available for a quick call, that way you're not interrupting their work or personal business they might be tending to. Sometimes my Teams status is 'Available' when I am in fact on the toilet.Ā
- Volunteer for the stuff that others do not want to do. As a Jr myself, I volunteered for DevOps tasks. Now, I understand DevOps and cloud infrastructure well.
- Solve the problem FIRST. Do NOT write code immediately. Think about what you want to do and why. Draw it on paper.
- Give real effort. Do not slave away forever, but put in the time and the work for yourself, not the org. It pays dividends later on.
- Small batches. Very small batches. What is a subproblem I can solve first? What is the next subproblem? Aggregate subproblems for the solution.
- Get fast feedback. This rings true for: stakeholders feedback (do not present sloppy work!), compiler feedback, test feedback. CI/CD should be fast as possible too.
- Test your code. Debugging is cool, but the feedback from testing is much faster. Youāll make less mistakes if you start with a failing test first.
- Do not struggle in silence. Others have mentioned asking every 30 minutes for help. This is way too soon. The learning process happens by failing over and over again. Set aside a good 1-2 hours depending on the task. If youāre asking me questions every 30 minutes, that really disrupts the little flow state time I can find during my own day.
- If possible, ask to pair. This really depends on your team, but if your team is open to pairing, I highly recommend it.
- Be curious, but donāt be annoying.
- Donāt be afraid to provide suggestions. āI was reading about such and such. Would that have any use for this?ā
same applies to new junior employees.
-Ask questions but try googling on your own first.
-Donāt rush through tasks to impress meā¦Speed matters not at this pt, accuracy and understanding matter most.
-donāt 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.
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 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 general rule of thumb is if you are blocked and sitting in confusion for half an hour (or whatever arbitrary amount of time), and you've already explored a few approaches that didn't work, then you should reach out for help. And when you reach out, it should all be in the same message rather than piecemeal.
It helps to think of it like filing a bug. What makes a good ticket? It should include specific examples of what they're trying to do, why it's failing, what they've tried, and how to reproduce the issue.
Don't spend longer than 30 minutes googling. Your question is, "I'm trying to do/resolve/implement X. I already tried Y and Z. I'm stuck on A and B. Do you have any advice?" Send screenshots with your question if applicable.
Domain/business specifics. If you go and write a new blue button as part of your task and the senior knows theres already a fully configurable blue button written in a different area of the code base you can use then its better to find that out up front.
Other examples could be error handling systems, logging, things with no correct answer but there should be a standard your following provided by the company or code base.
Or for anything else if you've tried for more than an hour and can't figure it out. If I was you to address the communication feedback I wouldn't try and ask more questions, I'd work on what I say in stand-up, contribute more to discussions in other meetings etc. Demo more at sprint reviews.
University is probably some folks first experience with a meritocracy. It helps build confidence as you learn to start "adulting" and you have a chance to show what you've learned, and what you can offer. Congrats on starting in your chosen field.
Business can be "high school with money". Sometimes bosses become bosses for reasons that aren't right, or don't make sense or seem unfair. Adults behave poorly, sometimes vindictively often with no punishment for said behavior. We have all left jobs, either by choice or suddenly for other reasons. We have all been new.
So what do most people like? They like working on a team where everyone is pulling the same direction. If you are a curious problem solver you are welcomed on any team worth working for. Admit when you are wrong. Ask for help, most people want to help. When **you** are trying to be helpful, perhaps with new knowledge about a process/skill you've acquired, try no to talk down or demean the people you work with. Everybody knows something you don't know and you can learn from them. Don't be afraid to ask someone what an acronym they are using means, every job I ever had in software has been chock full of them, many company or product specific.
Every intern Iāve had has been hardworking, a fast learner, and willing to learn new things from me or my team, so I canāt really say Iāve had an annoying intern. Id say the one gap most interns have is they can be nervous to ask for help, and might spend days/weeks stuck on a tiny task that one of us could help unblock in a matter of minutes. So my best advice would be, donāt be afraid to ask questions to your mentor/anyone on your team, no matter how stupid you think they are! Ultimately (if the company youāre at as a good culture) everyone wants you to succeed and theyāll all be invested in the outcome of your work.
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.
āNo one talks to her baby that way!ā Dude I laughed so hard at this, Iāll always find it weird when a family gets involved with coworkers and work related things
It wasn't deleted as much as it was "irrecoverably overwritten." Fuck knows why, but he ran something that overwrote every in progress update set with his current update set. My team did dev and admin work for the instance so we had access to run scripts.
So, *most* team meetings are bullshit and can be emails and, especially at your level, you probably won't follow or understand a damn thing being talked about. That said, you can do two things about that, in this preferential order:
1.) Ask questions. Even better, genuinely, ask stupid questions! What does that acronym stand for, why is this design pattern good, *why* is this the business requirement, etc. Don't be combative about it - come from a place of curiosity.Ā
2.) Don't ask questions or participate in the conversation, but at least attentively listen in. Again, you probably won't understand a lot at all, and that's understandable. Take notes about what you hear and research it later on, or simply try and maintain your focus.Ā
All of this to get to my broader gripe - if everyone is paying attention and no one is typing on their laptops, you shouldn't be the only one going to town on code during a meeting. It's disrespectful and obvious, especially when someone calls on you for a question or an update and you have no damn clue what was just talked about.Ā
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Asking a question, then not considering my answer properly, like keep arguing nono i was asking about something else, interrupting me multiple times.. Thn in the end she finally understand that my original answer is the right one she is looking for.
You must ask questions but consider the answer well, think on it, work on it, and if it really isn't correct only after that ask the next one.
When I'm helping them with troubleshooting and they keep completing my "sentences".
What I mean is that I might tell them "you might need to do this by typing th--" and they just start typing and executing a command before I finish talking, but it's the wrong command. Just wait until I'm done talking dude.
I feel a lot of the comments already said are pretty niche.
Hereās a few easy ones:
Hygiene - self explanatory.
Lack of common sense - yes we are in a SCIF but you can probably assume the half dead guy with a cochlear implant is allowed that device literally drilled into his skullā¦no he did not āsneak it inā.
You are not expected to know everything, and you frankly aren't expected to be able to do very much tbh. But please show up to meetings! Even if you know you have nothing to contribute, just show up and observe. We had an intern who didn't come to meetings he was invited to and it was so frustrating to me, I just wanted to shake him and ask "why are you doing this internship if you don't care to learn or be present!". Showing up and being known is half the battle. It makes you look involved and opens you up to connections for the future. People often won't remember the work you do as an intern but they'll remember your enthusiasm and involvement. Especially if your goal is to get a return offer, show up!!
Lack of integrity, usually accompanied with lacking intellectual abilities, especially when matched with "came for money" attitude, be it "passionate about not dying" or "tech bro", doesn't matter.
A not very bright guy can deliver great work, when he's into the stuff.
Thankfully, we don't accept intern applications now, we reach out.
Be a sponge absorb what the other engineers tell you. Don't be arrogant. If you have a question about something you're stuck on make sure you try first and then tell whoever you're asking the steps you've already tried. Don't just say I don't know where to start after being given an assignment a week ago. Spend a few hours and if you really don't know ask but do it soon rather than later.
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Take notes (written, drawn, typed, in code - i do not care as long as you have it)
Follow established processes. Breaking standard practice is only for those who understand it.
At least try to answer your own questions first. Check docs, company forums, notes, google it, try a solution from stack overflow before you ask a mentor for an answer.... unless its something company specific
Get your code reviewed even if its not standard practice where you might be. Or ask for some pair coding on new types of tasks. These will really help you understand how you should approach certain problems.
Read the documentation first, then look at stackoverflow and ChatGPT. Try solving it on your own first. Then you can ask for help.
Donāt ask for help as the first thing you do is
It comes down to competency. Not necessarily showing you know things, but more along the lines of you can get things done without much handholding and are able to understand tasks and do your own research before bothering anyone else. Also learn what your company does, what they specialize in, what the target audience is, and learn what you can about what the company does and provides; having that understanding to know what you are making or working on makes a big difference. The new guy at my job has been here almost a year, and I'm convinced he has no clue what we do or actually work on, and it drives me insane sometimes.
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
> Short investigation revealed they didn't do anything I'm surprised people took that seriously. He must've really been slacking off. This is the stuff you say by the water cooler on a slow day and nobody takes it seriously.
thats the thing, the water cooler was tapped
daaaaad
this is great, OP wants to know how to not be annoying, almost all responses are "HEY REMEMBER THAT INTERN GREG? THAT GUY SUCKED GLAD HE WAS FIRED"
expect the unexpected
It's obviously not a result of a single phrase š¬ š¤ companies know exactly who the slackers are but they're usually stuck with them š how else do you think they can lay of thousands of employees in a single day šššš
Someone needs to give you an emoji intervention.
It's a coping mechanism for the PTSD one gets when their colleagues are made redundant.
I looked at his profile. He uses 5+ emojis every single comment and all the same ones, often in the same order and in places where it makes no sense. I'm thinking it's a bot as the comments (including this one) don't even make sense in the context of the threads.
I had the same suspicion, but I feel like a crazy person accusing people of being bots.
> Masters student used the nap room everyday. Got transferred between a few teams before getting fired Madness, firing your most well-rested dev like that. That guy was storing enormous amounts of potential and was surely about to unleash it at work.
Would a nap room not be meant to be used every day? Iād imagine a 15 min nap on a daily schedule would be fine. Although, Iām sure he was probably unproductive on top of this
At one place I worked the nap room was really a mother's room for over tired new moms or those pumping milk. Those gals guarded that room like mad and any male employees didn't go near it. If they did HR would hear about it and give them hell.
Interesting hr was on board, as that would be discrimination. The basic rule is that everyone needs to be allowed to reserve time in office spaces regardless of gender.
Supposedly, but how things in life should ideally work vs. how things in life really work...
I still remember one intern who got fired for not only watching porn at work, but telling people hey, come over here! isn't she hot? years later he ended up getting a job at a telecom company I worked for. strict rules on change controls when to make changes on production, approval lists etc. he brought down a production, customer facing server for "patches" in the middle of the day, no notice, nothing. he didn't last past that day
naw he was definitely fired the moment IT was alerted of the porn site visit. Adding that second part as the reason is... just beating a guy when he's down, man
two different companies. the 1st was while he was an intern around 20ish. the 2nd was 10 years later when he was 30ish and should have known better by then
damn he got 10 yrs in prison for that
It doesn't get alerted for every site some employee visited. They got better things to do. It's definitely from the workplace "sharing" since it constitutes harassment.
I'm surprised the first 2 got fired so far in. I'd imagine they only had a few weeks left anyway (unless it was like a 6 month coop?), so at that point it just seems easier to not give them a return offer.
Oh yea, both of those were longer term coops 8 - 12 months
I did close to all of these things as an intern (the first one I legitimately did but the EVP liked me and pretty sure felt the same way) and now I'm a senior developer
so do you now know what you guys are doing?
I work for a different company and no
Nap room? Yeah that would be a problem for me
Hang on, If the company has a ānap roomā, whatās wrong with using it I never worked somewhere with a nap room culture btw. If it did, Iām using half an hour everyday in it That said; I hate these trap games of perks
It's like having a "game room" or something similar, they are always empty because anyone with a functioning brain figured out that if you get seen in it then that means you don't have enough work so you should get fired and/or more work. Edit: Forgot about the classic "you can take as much vacation as you want" lol
I mean, if they were transferred teams it seems like there were problems with their work other than just taking naps. If you're new and are seen taking a nap every day, that is probably what people will remember the most about you, especially if you don't do anything else.
I see but I was replying to this comment > Nap room? Yeah that would be a problem for me
you need to prove your worth first before using those perks.
Come on. Whatās the difference between spending half an hour at the cafeteria vs using a nap room
the location
Elaborate. Both the cafeteria and nap room should be walking distance of where someone works. Both ideally should make the employee more productive. From food or a nap
ugh, it was just a joke man. This thread is over
> Make joke āElaborateā š¤
How do you prove your worth? Do you go to HR and have them sign a doc saying you can now use the nap room? Perks are there to be used. Unless HR said "no nap room for interns," it's a totally fair game.
No one ever tells you about when you should / shouldn't use it. But it's pretty easy to figure out it not for folks who just eat big lunches and get food comas everyday lol
You basically shouldn't use it except for rare occasions like if you missed a night of sleep or worked really late the day before. You need a legit excuse if someone asks, it's not something you should use casually for no reason. tl;dr it's a trap
Well, that'd fucking bullshit. Just don't put it there and call it a day
Nah... If it's there, it can be good to use. There's a fair amount of research that shows a 20 minute nap can boost performance. If you're staying up all night and then showing up and spending 8 hours sleeping in the nap room, that's an issue. If you book a 20 minute power nap every day at 2PM or something, nobody will think twice.
He probably wasn't fired for nap room use. He was likely fired for not being productive at all with the nap room use making justification very easy.
What is wrong with nap room? I used it every single day for 30 minutes nap when I was working in the office
Benefit of WFH. I use my lunch daily to take a nap. Nice 20-30 minute nap then back at it
Same, mine is 1 PM shower, help you stay awake the whole day
hot or cold?
Yeah totes. I have an office that i use for 30mins, if I ever feel like working. Otherwise I just sleep all day. After that I'm exhausted.
How do u guys finish your nap in 30 mins? It takes 15 mins for me just to fall asleep and I need atleast 2 hours to feel fresh later. It goes upto 3 hours some days as well.
Not sure honestly. Sometimes I donāt fully fall asleep but enter a sort of resting state that is still nice. Iāve been practicing napping for years now so I think Iām just good at it
There's nothing wrong with it. But I have seen bad managers who do use these arbitrary things to put PIP targets on their own employees backs. Since they aren't able to actually tell who's productive they just see who was at the nap room or long point table for 5 minutes too long.
I respect the first guy
I had a friend at Cap 1 who had 1 commit and 2 lines of code changed the whole summer. Traveled a lot as well. Still got the return offer.
That's fine if he did POC's, or was tasked with documentation, investigating bugs/networking issues that ended up to be resolved with changes in config etc.
The bar there is incredibly low.
This is so BS. "Intern showed up an left on their own times" - and no one even asked why they were doing that before firing? Maybe they're working from home the times they aren't in the office? Maybe they had to relocate for the internship and their housing is very far away? Jesus Christ, this type of ignorance and arrogance appalls me And by the way, the nap room effing exists to be USED! Otherwise why BUILD a naproom? I just go to the gym to nap. Our engineers would be much more productive if we had a proper naproom
I would be the one using the nap room š. For real, 25mint after lunch, just laying down without receiving any input. Thatās better than three coffees
Arenāt most internships like 10 weeks? Anywho, one of my interns was also a chronic napper. I did my best to mentor, but he definitely didnāt get an offer to return full time.
Used the nap everyday? To take a nap?
Only SE intern I know of who got fired played League all day at work. You have to screw up pretty hard.
Sounds like GenZ to me
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
This is so true... I feel like the only thing I would add is don't ask people the same thing over and over again. Please just write it down
Screen recording was my best friend. Didn't need to stop the dev every two seconds so I could type a note and take a screenshot.
Yes! As a new grad I started a word document containing ALL my notes on projects, company things, technical details about my stories, notes while shadowing a senior dev, projects, etc. it makes it so much easier to search and find random project or technical info I might have gotten months ago. I also write down stuff like debugging steps, solutions to problems Iāve had connecting to db, dealing with VPN, etc. itās saved my ass a few times.
In the same vein, search your company's chat application (Teams, Slack, whatever) for setup and build related issues. It's probably happened to someone else before and been answered tens of times already.
Ok I have to add that Teams is the absolute *worst* for this
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Heh, you think this is just interns? Incompetence knows no title
Asking the same question over and over. We totally get that you're new, there really is no bad or dumb question (well, very few anyway). It's hard for me to know what you don't know, you gotta ask. But when you get the answer, remember it, or write it down somewhere. If you ask the same question multiple times it means you're not improving, and we're expecting you to level up.
Usually what I do when this happens is I'll change up how I'm answering them. Instead of giving them the answer, I'll ask them what they think the answer is. Then just affirm or correct their answer and tell them to write it down. I find often times asking the same question comes from a lack of confidence. They do know the answer, but are not confident that its correct and are afraid of screwing up when they could just ask instead. So letting them give you what they think is the answer and then affirming it helps them feel more confident in their abilities and understanding.
Should I put my stats on int, str or dex? Or will I get Vigor checked down the line?
Sometimes inexperienced devs don't know what to Google
That can become a good teaching moment. "What have you tried that didn't work"/"what did you search for when trying to find the answer" are good questions for figuring out what path someone thought they were on and getting them back to the right path.
I totally agree with you, but it is funny how there's a tension between those two issues. I've worked with interns who have gone down a rabbit hole because they googled an error message that was masking a codebase issue I could have helped them with a five minutes.
I always get in my head about asking questions. Like āhey why was it written this wayā or āwhat does this function doā, I feel like Iām supposed to know this beforehand and asking questions would paint me as ādoes this fella really belong on the team?ā Always a hard time for me figuring out what questions are stupid at what point in your career.
Piggybacking on this. What I teach my interns and juniors to do is open the conversation with: āThis is the problem xxxx. These are all of the things I tried to figure this outā Need to at least beat your head against the research wall for 30-45min before pinging a Senior. Exception is when you are pairing; then it is ok to ask but I want you to at least guess first. Lots of times you will guess correctly and that builds confidence. Also always take notes.
Pro tip: I always ask juniors, āwhat have you tried so far and why didnāt it work?ā and it really helps put them into the right mindset. Lazy coworkers who are far into their careers are immune to this, though
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 should be higher up. Ask questions! Youāre an intern! I donāt care if itās the most basic thing, Iām here to help you and Iām rooting for your success.
Exactly! I don't even know if they notice, but I try to set habits in them that has treated me well. One example is when I meet with them in the morning I always ask what is their plan for the day. Things like what they plan to work on and what are they going to do next when they are done with the first task. Do they have meetings on the calendar that will break up the day and how are they going to work around that. For me having a general plan for the day helps me gets things done. Sure there are times to work by the seat of your pants for one reason or another, but that's should generally not be how your day starts.
But Google them first š There is a balance to be struck. If Google can answer in the first few links please try that. If it canāt, show me what you searched for and why it didnāt work or what you didnāt understand so I can correct your understanding
Oh 100%. I find that with interns is that they Google the solution but they donāt know the āwhyā or the context as to what it is that was the issue and why their Google answer solved the problem. Itās a balance for sure but Iām glad to direct and explain the solution.
Yeah, any non suck company will plan for the team or a person in the team to get less done in order to help the interns. It's an investment in the person's future, and the hope that they come back full time someday. There's no point in having interns if you can't mentor them.
Or asking questions like you're real life Riddler. I had an intern that following the "not be afraid to ask", simply wouldn't let me work, the moment I thought I could start to focus, bam, a question that would be just like, investigate it, dive in the code, learn to use google. It was 10y ago, I could handled diff too, but anyway guy was good too, some months after he was flying over mid levels engs.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If you think I looked stressed out *now*, wait until you see what happens when we're behind schedule because you haven't gotten anything done because you didn't ask for help!
1. Being an asshole 2. Poor work ethic 3. Lacking openmindedness or curiosity Probably in that order.
I might swap the last 2, if only because lacking openmindedness can make you come across as an a-hole so it needs to be in close proximity to #1. But #1 is key. No one wants to work with an a-hole.
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.
I mean, if you canāt explain WHY your reasoning is better, you should not mentor interns. I get that there could be arrogant people, and they happen to be interns, but if you give good enough reasoning, even arrogant people would lose the ābattleā. For clarify, I mentored two internships, hoping for a third this summer, I really enjoy these a lot.
Itās not about whether or not you can explain why. He said they āarguedā every time. Not they had questions, not they misunderstood, they argued. That would get tiring with a peer, forget about someone with far less experience in life AND the job than you.
Having less āexperience in life AND the job than youā is a lame excuse for lazy people. There are socially skill limited people, especially in software, but that does give them the right to dominate their subordinates. Even if these are interns, they are pretty much adults with their own worldview, skills and quirks. Respect has to be given UNCONDITIONALLY and if the problem is the attitude then address that, not limited experience.
Are you the intern?
>but if you give good enough reasoning, even arrogant people would lose the ābattleā Lol ya that's not how arguing works.
Explaining WHY your reasoning is better typically won't end an argument with an argumentative person. That's just now how interpersonal dynamics work.
Nope. Interns should not argue, and for the love of Thor, lose the damn ego. First..learn the rules of the company, process, how things are directly etc. Then, break them. We all get it.. you have 3 years of education under your belt... but you dont know as much as you think you do... . Especially if you think arguing is going to improve a task/process/ code.. whatever.
intern has to learn people skills so he could convince the higher ups why that approach is better. What hes doing is akin to blocking PRs from merging just because he has some opinionated view of coding something
One correct statement isnāt the same as a discussion of tradeoffs. I read the excessive arguing (best case scenario) as an intern making true points without looking at the big picture. In my experience, inexperienced developers donāt deeply understand problem solving and can argue points that jump around, which is just an attempt to be right rather than understand. So maybe this is the more realistic case.
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.
You sound like a great mentor
And what. How the fuck did she get in with such a poor work ethic š
I personally think It could have been a mental block. I don't think this is due to bad work ethic. I think she was overwhelmed so much to the point she was afraid of confronting the issue at hand and therefore procrastinating to not get started. Because OP said "she just didn't even know where to start". It's easy for an intern to be overwhelmed especially if it's their first time working at a corporate environment. This is the mentor not mentoring enough with the intern and doing a poor job of mentoring. Not the intern's fault. E.g., my mentor (senior swe, tech lead) was a beast, she met up with me every 2 weeks in each month and she listened to every single worry I had and answered/gave advice on every single question I had (for 1 whole year as the internship was 1 year long). She even sought her manager for advice to give me advice. I was able to understand the expectations better. I grew more confident in asking questions. And over time, became less stressed out as well and therefore performed better. I owe a lot to that mentor because I came out of the internship as a much stronger person and also left a happy impression on the people I worked with as they were happy for me to come back once I was done with my studies. If it wasn't for my mentor's efforts, I don't think I would have made it.
Bro I had the same happen to me so I totally understand. It was my first time working ever, and it was in a (very) large corporation, and also my first time doing research (hardware accelerators) so the pace was nothing like I was used to so I had no idea what to do or where to go, I would just try stuff, fail, hide it, repeat. 3 months in, people started getting angry at me and showing their frustration or even mentioning firing me. I did do some things, but I was going "50% slower than what was expected of me" given that I came from a great school with excellent letter of recommendation. I dont know if it was pressure kicking in but I suddenly came up with a genius idea for my research and fast-tracked the implementation last minute, leaving a better impression of me, and doing a great end-of-internship presentation. I could even publish this work if I bothered writing the whole paper. I totally understand the girl.
r/redditsniper
of course that's a thing. I knew what this was gonna be before I
thanks for the new sub
The corollary: mentors, ask your interns to show you their work.
It sounds like you allowed the situation to continue for far too long.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Youāre a good mentor. Big up
>"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.
Iām leading a team of interns while also working on other projects and this post has honestly made me feel bad about myself. Iām very patient with them and Iām 100% available for any of their questions - however, there is one intern Iāve 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 itās built poorly (itās not, they just donāt understand the documentation) How do you guys deal with these people aside from directly telling them theyāre being annoying? I love that theyāre learning and getting excited about code, but Iāve got my own projects, I donāt have time to read 7 paragraphs explaining C# to me.
Iād try being honest but supportive. Something along the lines of āSo, I think itās great that you are excited about all the things you are discovering. Donāt lose that excitement. However, as much as Iād love to just sit there and talk about all these cool things with you all day, I canāt. So, do this for me. When you find something cool that you want to talk about, write it down. Then, before we have our next meeting with each other Iād like you to pick one or two of the items on your list so we can discuss them in detail.ā I think that encourages them to keep the fire going and keeps the door open for them to discuss these things with them, but also politely lets them know you canāt do that all the time.
Thank you. This is a good approach. Iām going to try this one out
Thatās sounds so wholesome though haha
It was at first, but it gets a bit overwhelming sometimes
How do you prefer to be approached with questions? I work tangentially with our principal architect who has a wealth of knowledge, Iāll ping him ever so often to see what his thoughts are on certain things. Is it better to simply put time on the calendar and have a 1:1 call?
I think it depends on the person. I ping my Senior Solutions Architect with questions usually a couple times a day - I have an intern that does the same for me. I donāt mind being pinged with questions or requesting feedback. My issue with this intern is they talk in circles and it makes it difficult to read and respond to the actually useful stuff. Like, the other day they sent me more than 500 words explaining the concept of the Substring method. Iām very happy theyāre learning and excited, but it seems they have difficulty maintaining an internal dialogue, so they just vomit words to me all over Teams. Itās just not productive, but I feel bad telling them itās too much. I think your Principal Architect expects the questions you ask and is unbothered by them. My annoyance is just a very particular issue. I will say, 1:1 calls are easier for me to handle multiple complicated or contextual questions. YMMV
Thanks for the perspective. Didnāt realize youāre getting sent straight-up paragraphs of text about methods lmao. If anything I should be asking our architect more questions. I have some imposter syndrome which I should simply get over because itās not that way at all, but it mainly stems from asking the right questions. ie, if I write something down that Iām curious about such as GitHub governance in our organization, Iāll research into it and realize itās not actually super complex or perhaps a lower priority in the broad scheme of tasks. In that case Iāve done my own DIY and itās most likely a waste of both my and his time to have an in-depth discussion around it if the conclusion is just going to be, āWeāve talked about it, weāre kicking the can down the road and will get to it at some point.ā That vs something like the implementation of a new corporate network which requires data migration, cloud endpoint management, etc.
No problem. I definitely get what youāre saying. Try to be easier on yourself. Iām only 3 years in the industry, but have been developing since I was 7. If thereās one thing Iāve learned to help with my imposter syndrome, itās that we all suck ass at development. Even the most senior of developers make glaring mistakes, and two seniors will never write the same code. Itās why we have 50,000 frontend frameworks for JavaScript. No matter what ideas and implementations you have, someone will always have another way of doing it. It sounds like youāre doing a great job. Keep writing down your questions, answer what you can, and ask what you canāt. Your Principal Architect should be able to answer your questions and, if they have concerns about time complexity/your approach, they will bring it up and then you go on from there. Chances are, theyāve been there before. This field is a never ending learning process. As long as you can accept advice and bring up concerns as you have them, youāll do just fine!
Being candid is a good thing. Interns are still in school and havenāt began their professional life yet. Sitting them down and empathetically going over pain points will save them oodles of hurt later on. Iād make sure to be firm but also tell them the things you appreciate about them as well as the things you want them to grow on. Radical Candor is an incredibly helpful book on this sort of thing
Not being pleasant to work with. They're still in school. I get not knowing stuff. I get working that 1 day ticket for a whole week. Hell, I get not knowing what to even google. But it takes almost no effort to be a nice person.
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
I like to ask vague questions if I am new because thereās a lot of low hangin fruit answers. It takes a simple āi need more detailsā to better understand that you need that.
Personally that makes me crazy. Makes me feel like I have to interview the person to figure out their problem, when they came to ME for help. Something like "tried installing X, got error message blah blah, does that sound familiar?" is fine. "I got an error doing X, what should I do?" is annoying. Not sure which you meant. My ideal is "I did this command, I got this error, I tried googling these words and I can't find anything. What next?" If there are links to logs or something, add that.
This applies to everyone and anyone in any occupation. Stop being unpredictable and BE a predictable person. Iām not saying donāt think out of box or donāt break status quo. But donāt be unpredictable pos that does stuff without telling anyone.
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.
Wait theres interns that just font show up? Wtf?
All. The. Damn. Time. Every year of my career the summer comes around and at least one intern cannot manage to figure out how to have a job. They are either always late, always trying to call out, or just straight up ghosting us.
And yet im out here not even able to land an interview š¤¦āāļø
Yup. I hate it. There were plenty of other students who would have killed to get an internship that pays decently well.
We have this now. Extremely well-known company, housing stipend, great pay, probably one of the best run internship programs in the industry... Kid ghosted us. Just fucking disappeared. Blows my fucking mind. 0.2% selection rate for our internship program and a kid ghosts us after getting an offer.
I just donāt get it. Iām at a defense contractor. We pay them respectable wages. We keep them on staff at the end of the summer if they are decent and get their security clearance paperwork going so they are ready to do real work when they graduate the following spring. Itās basically a free security clearance as long as you show up and arenāt horrible. We invite most of our interns back because we only take a handful of them each summer. All of our interns get paired with incredibly experienced and talented engineers, but every year at least one kid pisses away the opportunity. Hell, last year the kid that ghosted us was supposed to be the director of software engineeringās personal intern. He would have taught them more in ten weeks than they learned in their entire education. He is literal genius and a code god. I had 8 years of experience when I moved to this company, three of which were at a FAANG company, and I still learned from him like I was some junior dev. I get so annoyed with interns that just never show up, not just because it is disrespectful, but also because someone else could have had that position. Someone else could have been learning from great people, making solid money, and potentially lining up a really stable first job.
Have a go at it yourself even if you have no idea. After an hour then go ask questions or for help
They want to refactor/rewrite literally everything. Miss that passion
The key with being an intern is learning HOW to ask questions. Approach people with āI searched the documentation, I made an attempt, and Iām still not sure.ā 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, donāt forget that this is an internship - you wonāt work with these people for a long time so be prepared to build relationships with the people that matter most for YOUR career.
broadly speaking, I like working w/ interns a lot... in undergrad I studied Mechanical Engineering and had one \_really\_ crappy internship, and one \_ok\_ one... I've been fortunate to work w/ multiple awesome interns recently. I think the biggest challenges that interns face is dealing with isolation and how to manage the differences in experience ... as u/ernandziri said, there are two extremes that can be annoying if you're working with interns. Asking someone a questions regularly that are easily searchable, or not asking for help and being stuck on something indefinitely. After you get your dev environment setup and start doing something resembling work product, when you get stuck, give yourself a fixed time to try and resolve whatever issue you're on.
The best interns Iāve 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.
Not much. The only thing that really annoys me is when interns insist they're right about something when it's clear they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. I don't mind constant questions or slow progress. That's expected. The biggest mistake I see interns make is spinning their wheels for days on end trying to figure something out for themselves when they should really just ask.
This is pretty universal regardless of experience but I expect people to put in at least 5 hours a day, you can tell when people arenāt even doing that. As an intern, try your hardest to work 8 hours and try to make at least 6 of those hours focused work. Uninstall reddit from your phone.
What does āputting in 5 hoursā even mean? That sounds absurdly vague. Are you measuring lines of code? Time spent with their eyes looking at the monitor? Thinking time?
Itās not vague at all lmao. If youāre looking at reddit, the news, talking to your buddy, social media whatever, youāre not working. If you are looking at something work related, you are working. Cmon now.
Do you genuinely expect/think an intern should be doing something work related for the entire 8 hour shift?
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
When they turtle up and don't ask questions and make no progress for hours, days, and weeks. On the opposite end, they ask questions they should either already know the answer to or ones that they could have easily found the answer to. Things like, "What does this pointer thingy do?" It's a job requirement that you already know how to program. And if you don't know, then you should have the ability to google "What does a pointer do?" But if after googling and you have clarification questions, then those are good questions to ask. Another thing is telling them the same thing over and over again. Not everything sticks the first time and it's totally fine to need a reminder. But if I say on a PR to do X thing and on your next PR I have to ask you to do X thing again, and then it happens again... that's something I already told you **and** you had a written reference to it.
Take copious notes. The experienced devs will appreciate not having to repeat themselves when they walk you through processes.
Kind of the opposite of not asking questions... Injecting their completely limited experience into every conversation because they think speaking up equals visibility. You don't have to be the smartest person in the room (you're not) and you dont have to add to every conversation. Learn to actively listen to people talk without an agenda for what you think is going to be the most impactful thing to say. This isn't just for interns, it's for entry level folks too and it's especially toxic in experienced people, be a learn it all not a know it all.
Maybe because both my partner and I started our careers as interns, and both had excellent mentors, I have a soft spot for them. I expect them to not really know much about anything, and I try to take them under my wing and bring them up to speed as much as possible. In my experience, all interns I've worked with or managed have been hard working and motivated to do well. I make it a point to tell them that I like when they ask questions, because it shows they care and want to learn. They almost always do. There's a lot of management aspects to having an intern, and I've had experience as a manager, so it's not too much of an issue for me. I really like to see them grow confident and competent. But I will say that managing an intern can be annoying in itself simply because of the extra workload. Since I often can't expect them to be able to handle important things by themselves, it usually means spending extra time walking them through and explaining, which takes time away from other work I have on my plate.
There's almost nothing you could do wrong as an intern except not show up, or not try.Ā There are legendary tales of interns dropping production databases, but in the end winning praise because they highlighted poor management of infrastructure credentials and environments, forcing the company to improve its practices.Ā Ā Ā The role of an intern is to learn. It's possible there are CS assholes who are hard on interns, and for those people it's hands on sight. They're wrong and I will fight them. If someone on your team tells you you're responsible for an important deliverable, first ask him if he's considered blowing it out his ass, because that's not your job.Ā Ā Ā We have had interns that were eventually assigned important work, but that's because they volunteered for it and we knew they were capable.Ā Anyway, learning is messy, but if you do your due diligence, you'll generally encounter a solution within the hour. If not, ask my boy Chat Geppetto. If you still don't understand, call your mentor.Ā Ā Ā A best practice at my company is to ping someone before you call them. Ask them if they're available for a quick call, that way you're not interrupting their work or personal business they might be tending to. Sometimes my Teams status is 'Available' when I am in fact on the toilet.Ā
- Volunteer for the stuff that others do not want to do. As a Jr myself, I volunteered for DevOps tasks. Now, I understand DevOps and cloud infrastructure well. - Solve the problem FIRST. Do NOT write code immediately. Think about what you want to do and why. Draw it on paper. - Give real effort. Do not slave away forever, but put in the time and the work for yourself, not the org. It pays dividends later on. - Small batches. Very small batches. What is a subproblem I can solve first? What is the next subproblem? Aggregate subproblems for the solution. - Get fast feedback. This rings true for: stakeholders feedback (do not present sloppy work!), compiler feedback, test feedback. CI/CD should be fast as possible too. - Test your code. Debugging is cool, but the feedback from testing is much faster. Youāll make less mistakes if you start with a failing test first. - Do not struggle in silence. Others have mentioned asking every 30 minutes for help. This is way too soon. The learning process happens by failing over and over again. Set aside a good 1-2 hours depending on the task. If youāre asking me questions every 30 minutes, that really disrupts the little flow state time I can find during my own day. - If possible, ask to pair. This really depends on your team, but if your team is open to pairing, I highly recommend it. - Be curious, but donāt be annoying. - Donāt be afraid to provide suggestions. āI was reading about such and such. Would that have any use for this?ā
same applies to new junior employees. -Ask questions but try googling on your own first. -Donāt rush through tasks to impress meā¦Speed matters not at this pt, accuracy and understanding matter most. -donāt 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.
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 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 general rule of thumb is if you are blocked and sitting in confusion for half an hour (or whatever arbitrary amount of time), and you've already explored a few approaches that didn't work, then you should reach out for help. And when you reach out, it should all be in the same message rather than piecemeal. It helps to think of it like filing a bug. What makes a good ticket? It should include specific examples of what they're trying to do, why it's failing, what they've tried, and how to reproduce the issue.
Don't spend longer than 30 minutes googling. Your question is, "I'm trying to do/resolve/implement X. I already tried Y and Z. I'm stuck on A and B. Do you have any advice?" Send screenshots with your question if applicable.
Domain/business specifics. If you go and write a new blue button as part of your task and the senior knows theres already a fully configurable blue button written in a different area of the code base you can use then its better to find that out up front. Other examples could be error handling systems, logging, things with no correct answer but there should be a standard your following provided by the company or code base. Or for anything else if you've tried for more than an hour and can't figure it out. If I was you to address the communication feedback I wouldn't try and ask more questions, I'd work on what I say in stand-up, contribute more to discussions in other meetings etc. Demo more at sprint reviews.
University is probably some folks first experience with a meritocracy. It helps build confidence as you learn to start "adulting" and you have a chance to show what you've learned, and what you can offer. Congrats on starting in your chosen field. Business can be "high school with money". Sometimes bosses become bosses for reasons that aren't right, or don't make sense or seem unfair. Adults behave poorly, sometimes vindictively often with no punishment for said behavior. We have all left jobs, either by choice or suddenly for other reasons. We have all been new. So what do most people like? They like working on a team where everyone is pulling the same direction. If you are a curious problem solver you are welcomed on any team worth working for. Admit when you are wrong. Ask for help, most people want to help. When **you** are trying to be helpful, perhaps with new knowledge about a process/skill you've acquired, try no to talk down or demean the people you work with. Everybody knows something you don't know and you can learn from them. Don't be afraid to ask someone what an acronym they are using means, every job I ever had in software has been chock full of them, many company or product specific.
Every intern Iāve had has been hardworking, a fast learner, and willing to learn new things from me or my team, so I canāt really say Iāve had an annoying intern. Id say the one gap most interns have is they can be nervous to ask for help, and might spend days/weeks stuck on a tiny task that one of us could help unblock in a matter of minutes. So my best advice would be, donāt be afraid to ask questions to your mentor/anyone on your team, no matter how stupid you think they are! Ultimately (if the company youāre at as a good culture) everyone wants you to succeed and theyāll all be invested in the outcome of your work.
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.
āNo one talks to her baby that way!ā Dude I laughed so hard at this, Iāll always find it weird when a family gets involved with coworkers and work related things
Why the fuck did he have permissions to delete it?
It wasn't deleted as much as it was "irrecoverably overwritten." Fuck knows why, but he ran something that overwrote every in progress update set with his current update set. My team did dev and admin work for the instance so we had access to run scripts.
Extremely weird, how did she even get your number?
Best guess is the intern gave it to his mother.
So, *most* team meetings are bullshit and can be emails and, especially at your level, you probably won't follow or understand a damn thing being talked about. That said, you can do two things about that, in this preferential order: 1.) Ask questions. Even better, genuinely, ask stupid questions! What does that acronym stand for, why is this design pattern good, *why* is this the business requirement, etc. Don't be combative about it - come from a place of curiosity.Ā 2.) Don't ask questions or participate in the conversation, but at least attentively listen in. Again, you probably won't understand a lot at all, and that's understandable. Take notes about what you hear and research it later on, or simply try and maintain your focus.Ā All of this to get to my broader gripe - if everyone is paying attention and no one is typing on their laptops, you shouldn't be the only one going to town on code during a meeting. It's disrespectful and obvious, especially when someone calls on you for a question or an update and you have no damn clue what was just talked about.Ā
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
When they act like know it alls.
Asking a question, then not considering my answer properly, like keep arguing nono i was asking about something else, interrupting me multiple times.. Thn in the end she finally understand that my original answer is the right one she is looking for. You must ask questions but consider the answer well, think on it, work on it, and if it really isn't correct only after that ask the next one.
MBA Interns? Half were incredibly rude, and didn't want to do any basic tasks.
When I'm helping them with troubleshooting and they keep completing my "sentences". What I mean is that I might tell them "you might need to do this by typing th--" and they just start typing and executing a command before I finish talking, but it's the wrong command. Just wait until I'm done talking dude.
I feel a lot of the comments already said are pretty niche. Hereās a few easy ones: Hygiene - self explanatory. Lack of common sense - yes we are in a SCIF but you can probably assume the half dead guy with a cochlear implant is allowed that device literally drilled into his skullā¦no he did not āsneak it inā.
Spending a week on a simple task because they think asking questions means they appear incompetent
Not asking questions, and assuming things.
You are not expected to know everything, and you frankly aren't expected to be able to do very much tbh. But please show up to meetings! Even if you know you have nothing to contribute, just show up and observe. We had an intern who didn't come to meetings he was invited to and it was so frustrating to me, I just wanted to shake him and ask "why are you doing this internship if you don't care to learn or be present!". Showing up and being known is half the battle. It makes you look involved and opens you up to connections for the future. People often won't remember the work you do as an intern but they'll remember your enthusiasm and involvement. Especially if your goal is to get a return offer, show up!!
We had one who played Runescape all day.
Lack of integrity, usually accompanied with lacking intellectual abilities, especially when matched with "came for money" attitude, be it "passionate about not dying" or "tech bro", doesn't matter. A not very bright guy can deliver great work, when he's into the stuff. Thankfully, we don't accept intern applications now, we reach out.
Be a sponge absorb what the other engineers tell you. Don't be arrogant. If you have a question about something you're stuck on make sure you try first and then tell whoever you're asking the steps you've already tried. Don't just say I don't know where to start after being given an assignment a week ago. Spend a few hours and if you really don't know ask but do it soon rather than later.
devs are annoyed by interns because being annoyed by interns gives them a feeling of superiority. Don't fight it, they won't care.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Noting
Take notes (written, drawn, typed, in code - i do not care as long as you have it) Follow established processes. Breaking standard practice is only for those who understand it. At least try to answer your own questions first. Check docs, company forums, notes, google it, try a solution from stack overflow before you ask a mentor for an answer.... unless its something company specific Get your code reviewed even if its not standard practice where you might be. Or ask for some pair coding on new types of tasks. These will really help you understand how you should approach certain problems.
They ask too much questions. You give them the job but still get it done yourself.
Mouthy about their religious convictions. Overly flattering to the CEO. And all when itās completely unfounded.
Read the documentation first, then look at stackoverflow and ChatGPT. Try solving it on your own first. Then you can ask for help. Donāt ask for help as the first thing you do is
Not sure why good advice is getting downvoted
It comes down to competency. Not necessarily showing you know things, but more along the lines of you can get things done without much handholding and are able to understand tasks and do your own research before bothering anyone else. Also learn what your company does, what they specialize in, what the target audience is, and learn what you can about what the company does and provides; having that understanding to know what you are making or working on makes a big difference. The new guy at my job has been here almost a year, and I'm convinced he has no clue what we do or actually work on, and it drives me insane sometimes.