Status Report on my Software Engineering Intership

In the time since I first wrote about my software engineering internship program I’ve gotten a bit more organized and had some new observations and insights. The philosophy behind the program is the same, but I can now better discuss the practical implementation, side-effects, and ROI. If you are interested in starting your own program, you should definitely read my first post on the topic as it covers the strategic elements in greater detail.

Return on Investment

Running the internship has costs. They are:

  • ~15% of the mentor’s salary
  • ~5% of the coach’s salary
  • The intern’s salary
  • The cost of equipment
  • The cost of a Pluralsight License
  • The cost of Clean Code and The Pragmatic Programmer

How do we justify this to the business? How is the program cost-effective?

After the bootcamp phase of the program the interns can usually write test-driven code with a level of quality approaching that of any other software engineer. We give them projects to work on that would not otherwise be approved. They “fill in the gaps” solving problems for our development organization.

Here are some of the projects they’ve worked on:

  • GitBack – a console application used to backup all of your git repos to disk
    • It’s open source. Feel free to use it and/or enhance it.
  • A web application portal to host prototypes of tools and reports needed by the business that don’t neatly fit into any existing application.
  • A web application to report on our hardware eco-system–which machines are used for what in which environments?
  • A web application to scrub and provision sql server databases into non-production environments for testing purposes

The other major way we benefit as a department is that we get the opportunity to work with people while they’re starting out. We train them to build software our way. We get to know their warts, and they ours. When we have open positions, we prefer to offer them to people we know. We have had 2 direct hires of college students out of our internship program. When they come to work for us, they already know they like our environment. That may not sound like a lot but it can add up fast when you consider recruiter fees.

But wait! There’s more!

Alternative Career Path

After I’d been running the program for a year or so, something interesting happened: We had a member of another department request to go through our internship program. He wanted to effect a career-change into Software Engineering. Since we already had the program in place, we were able to accomodate him. Before he had even finished the program, we had another member of our organization request the same thing. We are able to provide an alternative career path to our organization and the development department benefits.

As of this moment we have hired:

  • 2 interns out of college
  • 2 career changes out of our internal organization
  • 1 career change from outside our organization

That’s roughly 20% of our development organization.

Further, we have made the program available to people in other departments whose jobs require that they write code even though they’re not software engineers. It is my hope that this will result in higher quality code across the rest of our organization as well, though that remains to be seen.

Curriculum

The curriculum of the program has remained largely unchanged since I first wrote about it. However, I’ve found that I can make it largely self-serve for the first 4-6 weeks by organizing it as a sequence. This reduces the amount of time I need to spend mentoring the intern. Of course, once they get started on their real project my investment will be greater.

Here is the updated curriculum:

  1. Clean Code
    1. Read chapters 1-9 before the refactoring your homework exercise.
  2. Setup your dev machine (we have powershell scripts for this).
  3. Learn about Github & Branching
    1. trygit
  4. Refactor your own school homework exercises to improve the readability of your code
    1. you are practicing what you have learned in Clean Code
  5. Movies Tutorial – build an ASP .NET MVC web application
  6. watch ASP .NET MVC 4 Fundamentals
    1. Sections 1 & 2
    2. The purpose here is to learn in detail what you did in the Movies Tutorial
  7. watch MVC5 Fundamentals
    1. Identity & Security
    2. Bootstrap
    3. Web Api 2
    4. Entity Framework 6
  8. Music Store Tutorial – build another ASP .NET MVC web application
    1. You should see that you are much faster this time around.
    2. You should understand the “why” in the steps of the tutorial.
  9. Nerd Dinner Tutorial – here’s another version updated for EF4
    1. These tutorials are out of date. To complete the project you will likely have to switch between them.
    2. Use EF Code first instead of what’s in the tutorial for data access.
    3. Stop when the tutorial tells you to import MicrosoftAjax.js.
      1. Chris will give you his speech on why this file is historically important and why we’re not going to use it.
      2. You’ll use jquery instead.
  10. Pair on the Bowling Game Kata
  11. Implement Fizz Buzz on your own using TDD.
  12. Learn about Dependency Injection
    1. Watch Dependency Injection On Ramp
    2. Read Dependency Injection Patterns
  13. Introduce Fakes, Stubs, and Mocks using this PluralSight video on Rhino Mocks
  14. Practice using Mocks and Stubs using this exercise
  15. Get started on your first real project!

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