What is the economics of hiring interns?

An internship is basically a months-long job interview. It is often difficult or undesirable to fire an employee, so the internship provides a risk-free way to evaluate a young employee and see if they are a good programmer.

No one wants to have interns sitting idle (since that provides little insight into their abilities), but the demands of customers obviously trump the commitment to training an intern. So unfortunately real work can keep the intern's supervisor from getting as much time with them as they would like.

The reality for an intern is that your code (if any) is not going to be included in a production application. The best you could hope for is to contribute unit tests from a code perspective. There is the possibility for meaningful contribution in other ways, but that isn't really the point. The point is for the company to evaluate you and for you to evaluate them as an employer. There is little downside for you an intern since you are probably making more money than you ever have before, and at least the experience will look great on your resume even if you end up doing very little. But hopefully your experience is better than that.

My advise is to be eager to learn. Learn how to use the software your company makes. Look for ways you can contribute something and suggest it (likely to be testing/QA). Be proactive and curious. Be patient. Be humble. Be friendly. If you can pair program with an established engineer that is ideal. But you will mostly be watching, and it will move REALLY fast, so be prepared.

Interns are part of the recruiting pipeline and ramp-up pipeline. It gives the employer an evaluation period much better than an interview. It gives you a chance to see what work there is really like. They hope you enjoy it, and come back partially ramped up.

Speaking of ramp up, it's tough. It takes months for a new hire straight from college to be a net positive (not just when they start accomplishing things, but when they have accomplished enough on their own that it has 'paid back' the time spent teaching/mentoring/leading them).

Where does that put interns? Well, it's similar, but then the intern leaves when they're getting the hang of things (so generally they leave a deep net negative) Not to mention that interns generally are less experienced than the new hire, there's not expected to be a good return on investment during the summer.

Finally, because the intern has a lot of learning to do, and because they will leave soon, they basically can't be given any mission critical projects. So they will be given the low priority 'nice to have' tasks. This can result in a sad state where an intern will leave a 3/4 finished project, and come back a year later to see that no one has finished it (or worse, the project may be deleted).

(On the other hand, I think interns are a great way to get "low priority by PM standards" work done that the engineers really want to get done)

Economics? Well interns are cheap. Way cheaper than a FTE. They have low payment rates, and they're only paid for a few months. The bigger costs are the extra time from the engineers to help you ramp up (and the delays in their projects).

You'll need to just keep asking for tasks. Ideally you'll have a project that takes half or more of your internship. If you do, make sure to set milestones, break down the project into achievable tasks and demonstrate forward progress. At the end of summer you'll leave, and you want to have at least documented all the things you accomplished.

If they don't have stuff for you, see if you can take some tasks from their backlog. They probably wont let you have things that need to ship soon, but you can probably find something they'll agree to.

Good luck

I'll assume you're talking about highly-paid SWE internships. Let's look at each agent's perspective:

- interns (pro) benefit from having the internship on the resume

- interns (pro) benefit from the experience of being at a tech company

- interns (pro) benefit from the networking with employees and fellow interns

- interns (pro) benefit from the huge salary

- overall, interns MASSIVELY benefit.

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- companies (con) monetary cost. But $50k is not a lot for a company really.

- companies (pro) benefit from cheaper hiring pipeline. Training talent is much cheaper than poaching from elsewhere. That $50k upfront cost is much cheaper than paying $300k recurring for a senior engineer.

- overall, companies benefit a lot from interns, and that's why every companies does internships.

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- teams (con) the effort. You have to mentor interns, assess them, come up with a project that's cool but not mission-critical.

- teams (con) the mentoring costs. The mentor will probably take up 20% of 2 engineers time. This is very problematic if a deadline is coming up and everyone is needed.

- teams (pro) forces them to improve onboarding documentation.

- teams (pro) interns joining as full-time. Anecdotally, I've seen it pretty often that interns end up joining the same team they interned at. The team will be ecstatic to gain another engineer that is already ramped up and works well in the team.

- overall, unclear if teams win or lose. But you can definitely tell that if the team doesn't prepare, doesn't give assignments to their interns, etc., that they consider them a liability.