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

[Bill Freeman]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 1:00 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen <rozzin at hackerposse.com
> wrote:
...

>
> 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.
>

I can see that criticism for someone trying to break into an area.  But I
come from a time when your employer owned your technical output.  Not just
work on the project during work hours, but work done on your own time
(there is no own time for a salaried employee) on anything vaguely in your
field.  For most of my life the code that I've written (and the hardware
that I've designed has been copyright property of my employer, and not
permitted to be shown outside the company.  Web development was a great
boon to me since I could point to some of the sites I'd developed, since
their URLs were public.

When on the other side of the table, I've settled for giving unusual
problems, to see how the person thinks.  I've interviewed lots of folks
with a portfolio who apparently were led by the hand, because they can't
tell me how it works, or can't show me how it would be modified to do X.

>
> 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.
>

Again, I'm fortunate enough to have been in college before the internship
craze.  There were a very few students who had internships, unpaid, but
they were closer to research assistance positions, just not with a
university lab.  (My friend who, in the dead of night, got to answer a
question about the Apollo guidance system on the circuit for one of the
pre-landing  flights, probably would not trade that experience for even a
large sum of money, and did, in fact lear plenty.)

>
> 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.
>

And I'd like to point out that in software development the requirement to
be a good learner never goes away.  Nothing stays the same.  It's always
funny to see the job requirements for 5 years experience with a technologh
that's 2 years old.

>
> 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.
>

Small teams are great.  You might get lucky, but in general, you don't get
what you don't pay for (the converse not, in general being true).  If you
don't find satisfactory candidate, you may want to consider paying for a
good learner with more experience.  The time from drag to thrust will
probably be quite small.

>
> > 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 guess.  I can appreciate the anti-telecommute policies because I can't
work effectively at home, without interaction.  There's also probably a
rock and a hard place problem for employers in that there may be a
regulatory difficulty in paying different amounts for the same work
depending on where the employee lives.  They get away with it for
outsourcing because those people aren't employees.  Even for in country,
it's much easier for a 65 year old to find good paying consulting work than
mediocre regular employment.  I've been lucky to prove myself and be taken
on as a regular employee at a good salary.

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