I’m becoming a “manager” of an intern this summer. As an intern, what would you want to tell your manager?

Oh hey - I think I'm an intern in your org (in a core team, not proserve or something). Maybe I could talk about things specifically experienced that are pros/cons w.r.t. my project lol.

As a disclaimer, I'm skeptical that anyone will have that special a project - especially compared to prior internships at smaller companies where there can be even more ownership (ie one internship I was told to propose and deliver a project that added long-term value to the company) or something flashy (another internship I was doing a novel R&D project for the company's flagship product)

Pros:

  • Mid-value, low-stakes: What I'm doing is a helpful and important feature, but if stuff breaks (ie a reference gets rolled back and now the data I'm working with is lost) the damage is minimal
  • Full-pipeline: Writing code is to some extent the easy part - it's a lot more interesting to have to work my way through (ie from adding/upgrading dependencies to provisioning infra to writing integration tests)
  • Buy-in: My team has a vested interest in my success and quality since it's going into prod; this makes people more helpful because they know they have to maintain it
  • Relevant experience: My mentor for a large part knows about what I'm doing, so I typically can get advice on best practices for what I'm doing

Cons:

  • Permissions: Because I'm touching (kind of) user data, there's a bunch of stuff that I needed to change but didn't have permission to (and as an intern I couldn't see the logs either). Hail Mary CRs aren't great
  • Dead ends: Sometimes I'm when debugging some crap nobody on the team can help, it really sucks.
  • Stepping on toes: My changes are right in the way of another group's launch, creating a ot of pressure to rollback if I don't have an immediate fix (especially since the oncalls for that team were too busy to help debug)
  • (too-full) pipeline: It's cool writing code that's easy to see the end of where it touches, but when someone pings you a week later about a repo you didn't even know existed breaking, and there's no logs/canaries it's kind of annoying
/r/cscareerquestions Thread