Looking for an intern to play with a Linux-powered robot fleet

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

On 2015-07-31 18:04, Bill Freeman wrote:
> "Oh, but first are you experienced?  Have you ever been experienced?"
> (Jimi Hendrix, for the young amongst you)
> 
> To get good jobs, you need things on your resume.


"Things", yes....

And many employers seem to like "things" to be a list of _places_
where you've been employed previously.

While I'm often amazed that candidates for engineering jobs will show up
with _no portfolio_ (especially when we're talking about software jobs:
mechanical engineers, for example, may have a legitimate case that it's
hard to get personal access to the tools they'd need to build a personal
portfolio; but the tools required to develop software?); I'm even more
amazed that people on the other side of the interview-process often
have no idea what to do when a candidate does have a portfolio of work
available for review.

> Before that, unless you're in a field where you can publish while doing
> graduate work (it's own form of internship), you have to take low paying,
> crummy jobs.  In some fields they're called interships.
> It's the non-paying ones that are real scams.

That was one of the things that soured me on college: not only was the experience
non-paying, they were actually _charging me_; and the `experience' part of the
experience wasn't all that great, either. And I had to buy my own books.
And I had to buy my own equipment. And the amount of _time_ that it seemed
to require if I actually wanted to be good at `being a student' was crazy.

And I guess that's part of the problem that I was trying to solve, here:
it's late enough in intern-season that the bright, enthusiastic kids who
could actually manage to be `good students' while simultaneously being
good _learners_ appear to have mostly already settled into internships;
and I was expecting--or at least hoping--that there are some good learners
and do-ers who basically aren't enough like `good students' to have
bothered to go looking for the internships that they're supposed to
(or who aren't doing internships because they're still in high school
 and high-school kids don't get directed to do internships like
 college kids do); or who haven't been snapped up by traditionally-minded
organisations who just want to count years-of-college + GPA.

There's certainly a selfish aspect to this--if only that we're a really
small team, and there's only so much `drag' we can afford. But,
on the giving hand, I do actually think the `small team doing big things'
scenario has a lot of pedagogical merit for someone who's up to it.

> The real concern for your son is how the outsourcing trend going to play out. 
> You can't live here and compete with those salaries.

And yet people live in Silicon Valley. That should make the salaries
for people telecommuting from NH for CA work pretty competitive,
shouldn't it?

(I retrospect, the last time I was talking to a recruiter
 who said I'd have to move to CA even if I was going to  end up
 in the company's Boston office, I guess I should tried proposing:
 "how about I just stay in NH, I do CA software work on the CA schedule,
 and you get to pay me like I work in MA?").

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."