Ask HN: Market need for unpaid remote internships to gain experience?

2 points by utefan001 7 years ago | 3 comments

In the past week I have had 8 people say they are interested in doing an unpaid remote internship in order to gain experience.

Long explanation, but context is important.. Considering my side project (studycity dot org) involves helping children gain knowledge and confidence through "encouraging" them to visit education sites, detecting the points earned, and rewarding them by granting another hour of entertainment sites... For me, it makes sense to also offer a way to help others overcome the dreaded "we can't hire you because you don't have enough experience" response. One person said she has submitted over 200 resumes and heard that line dozens of times.

I can easily think of 20 open source projects that a team of interns could work on. In addition, it wouldn't matter if new interns worked on something that had already been solved because the point is not to ship what they build, but provide a way to learn and gain experience. As long as the new interns don't discover the previous interns work, the same projects could be repeated allowing the mentor to step away and push the more experienced interns to become the mentor.

I imagine a stackoverflow type "cooperative" where the end goals are all understood by the group and jerks are not tolerated. Maybe this already exists or is a stupid idea. If this is stupid, I blame all the songs I listened to in the 80s and 90s that seem to have brainwashed me to try to help people and make the world better.

<start>

Looking back, I now realize in 1985, when all those famous celebrities sang "We are the world" to raise money for the starving children in Africa I probably saw the images of hungry children and heard that song on the TV or radio 100s of times. As a curious 8 or 9 year old, it obviously influences the choices I make now that I have some $$ I can spend each year without incurring debt.

</end enlightenment> #SNLDeepThoughts

gus_massa 7 years ago |

> In addition, it wouldn't matter if new interns worked on something that had already been solved because the point is not to ship what they build, but provide a way to learn and gain experience.

I think you just reinvented school. :)

Probably this is how schools were invented. The problem with school/university is that you must ensure that the students have a good chance to pass the course and that they have a broad knowledge. So instead of real project the teacher must find some good educational project with an easy to measure difficulty. Add some academicism, because teachers like to talk to teacher about cool things, and you get the current educative system.

The idea of internships is that the "students" face some real life project and get some real life experience. But it is difficult to scale.

utefan001 7 years ago | |

Not necessarily, as a Oregon based non profit / a "real" company we can add the interns to the staff web page, we can tweet or blog that Carlos / Carla made this thing or solved this problem the company or software had. When a college emails to verify the internship offer we are able to confirm so that the student gets as much credit as his friend interning at a larger company. We could even have a shitty slow timecard system and have a guy who emails you like the world is ending if your timecard is late. Then we could practice not doing all the wrong things during our daily conference call meetings. Older interns could give really ackward and irrational performance reviews. Why wait to show them what an incompetent boss is like if they could experience it as an unpaid intern? Also practice the many IT nightmares that senior people have been burned by. "Hey can you restore the S drive you have been responsible for backing up?" "Damn, no files below 100 nested levels are here! Did you test the backups to see if they were restoring everything?" "All files are replicated to the mirror sure, cool, looks like accidental deletes are also replicated"

utefan001 7 years ago | | |

Basically creating a minor leagues of devops recreating famous or no so famous mistakes that have been made in the last 40 years. "Hey Carlos my emails won't work over 500 miles"