How do you define an intern level project?
Hi there Taro people!
I want to mentor an intern, but in order to get one my manager asked me to come up with a few project proposals.
I’m finding that hard to do because I have no idea what could be good intern-level tasks, and to be honest I don’t have many ideas coming to me at all.
Have you ever been through that and could give me some advice?
Discussion
(2 comments)- 0
2 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroI was an intern manager at Meta, mentored other interns directly, and even mentored other intern managers, so I can share some advice here. I'm glad you're interested in raising an intern - It's a very fulfilling experience!
Intern Project Constraints
It's important to remember that interns are effectively clueless children, especially if it's their 1st internship. Because of this, make sure that the project is:
- Well-defined - The requirements, designs, and technical architecture should be crystal clear. They are largely expected to just be able to code things out.
- Doesn't involve cross-functional (XFN) partners - The definition of XFN is either someone outside of engineering (e.g. legal, design, product) or an engineer that reports to a different director of engineering (sister team isn't too bad).
- Is low technical complexity - It should be something that you can code up in your sleep as a fully-fledged full-time engineer.
- Is self-contained - The project should just be 1 big thing on its own, not a bunch of smaller disconnected projects or tasks awkwardly bundled up. At worst, give your intern 2 medium-sized projects (1.25 months each). Very junior engineers are extremely bad at context switching.
When it comes to projects that meet all of these requirements, especially at Big Tech, internal tools are great. I feel like most Meta interns worked on internal tools - By the time I was an intern manager, the stakes for Meta were too high to give mission-critical pieces to interns (don't want an intern causing a massive security leak or something and leading to another wave of bad press for Meta 😅). I made my intern build an internal tool (I talk about it in-depth in my L4 -> L5 course here), and all the other interns I mentored also worked on internal tools.
How To Find Intern Projects
The absolute best way to come up with an intern project is to look at your workload and see if you can cleanly partition off some non-complex piece to give to someone else. One way to do that is to look at the problems you're facing - Is there a pain point you have that can be solved with code? If so, congrats - You might have discovered a great internal tool opportunity!
If there isn't scope that you can carve off from your own, look at your team's overall backlog. Just sift through projects until you find something that meets all the requirements.
Deliverable
Your end goal is to create a master spec for the proposed project. It should be very similar to the one I made for this course here: System Design Masterclass: Shipping Real Features To Production
The doc doesn't have to be as insanely detailed as mine though. An intern project will be way lower complexity, both on the technical side and the people side.
- 0a month agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
+1 to what Alex said. I'd also avoid anything that is on the critical path for a launch since there is high variability for their competency and productivity.
Can you look at past intern projects on the team? Usually at a Big Tech co there are plenty of intern projects around dev tools, experiment ideas, or new project launches that could be a good intern project.
Also see this guide I wrote about how interns should succeed, it could inspire some ideas about a good project: https://blog.jointaro.com/the-ultimate-software-engineer-internship-survival-guide/
