How should we handle interns who are not performing?

Question

We took on some interns who are still in college on the request of one of their teachers. The interns don't have much skill at all and don't seem to be taking things seriously. They lack enthusiasm: missing deadlines, just not really trying it seems. They seem to be taking the internship just for the sake of putting some experience on their resume.

From the start, since they have a lack of knowledge, they have been treating it more as a class than an internship. They seem to only try to learn while in the office and don't even try to go over anything learnt that day at home. Of course this means their progress is really slow since they just tend to try in the office.

I've given them deadlines to learn something by certain dates and they all come back without having gone through a single chapter/lesson. Just today, one of them told me they can't access something. Something I gave them Monday and they are supposed to get done by tomorrow. Had they gone through this all when given on Monday, we wouldn't have run into this issue.

How can we handle this? Are we failing as an internship program? Should we just cut the interns, knowing they are not putting forth any effort?

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Thanks all for the feedback. We did communicate clearly that this was different from school and that deadlines are important and what the expectations from them were.

Noted on the feedback that homework shouldn't be assigned. I think that was maybe the biggest mistake to try to get things to move a bit faster. These are part timers, only four hours a day, so going through the material in the office without practice wasn't getting us anywhere. So we basically asked them to practice at home. It is kind of what a real life job would be.

It's frustrating when you try to teach them something like writing a paragraph and they don't know what a sentence is. You spend hours teaching them and a few days later they still don't have any idea what it is. Even though you have taught and given them many resources to figure it out. Then it's teaching the same thing over again.

You are right about the institute not caring. They just sent the students, no follow up or anything. The students don't seem to care much either than just meet the requirement of doing an internship. I think we will just let the time run out and not have them back or deal with that institute again.

Answer 1

Interns are not expected to know very much.

Interns are expected to be taught and mentored until a decision can be made on whether they are going to become full-time employees.

If the interns' attitude is poor then simply don't invite them back and don't offer them a job.

Even if you employ CS graduates that know a great deal in regards to tech it may take them up to a year before they really hit their productive stride. Depending on how orthodox the tech that is used in the company, is.

If you have a good uni that produces good talent then it is natural to want to attract job seekers that are close to you.

You can call this an internship but whatever you call it consider it more like a glorified ad campaign to generate potential local employees. Rather this than expecting them to produce anything economically viable. Basically just sell your company as a place to work. Have fun with it but most importantly just have realistic expectations.

Internships, unfortunately, have become a farce. It is just a practice where you employ people to do real work but call it an "internship" so you can screw them out of a proper salary.

Internships as they should be done should bridge the divide between book smarts and first-hand experience of the work environment.

Not just coerce people to do work they are not ready for so as to save some money on a companies wage bill.

Answer 2

It's all about expectations and communicating them.

What can you expect from people 1.5 years into their CS education when they are placed in your organisation through some education program?

Well, if they come from a good education and well organized institution, you can expect to get a team of people that will develop an application for you, by the requirements you set. It might not be as good as professionals, it might not be as much as professionals would get done in the same timeframe, but it is a full fledged application with features. You can expect their mentor from the institution to come over and discuss progress with you, before, mutiple times during, and after the placement. You are obviously suppsoed to help them with everything specific to your organization, but you are not supposed to be their teacher. More like their manager. Or maybe as if you had hired contractors.

That is how my education path worked in the center of Europe. It was very successful, the company hired my team after that and I had many other teams and over the years hired a few of them myself as a technical manager in that company.

However you could also get some completely disinterested institution where people needed to be placed. That doesn't care. That did not teach enough for their people to be a benefit to the organisation. That does not follow up or check on progress. As a result, you would obviously not extend an offer to the students and you would not accept another placement from their institution. Lesson learned.

This is what we do here and it has obvious benefit to both the organization, the students and the institution.

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You can always expect less, but you have to figure out what the benefit to you is then and if it is worth it doing it at all. Your company is not a charity for incompetent developers, nor is it college for people that cannot afford college.

Now, I have no idea what an "internship" is expected to be where you live. The problem is that even where I live, there are three different types of placement that would be translated as "internship", with wildly differing expectations. Add the typical US internship (that I know little about) and you have 4 types and yours are not even included. I would take a wild guess and say you have no idea either, how this internship of yours is defined exactly. So the first step is: clarify what an internship with your company is. Offer that transparently, meaning tell people beforehand what you expect. If they do not perform, talk to their teaching institutions supervisor. If they cannot get them to perform, do not take interns from them again. Please note that I mean "perform" in the general sense of doing okay inside your expectations, however you set them. They will obviously not perform as well as professionally trained, experienced people. They are on their way getting there.

You should discuss your internship expectations with your manager, because depending on what you expect, you have to invest vastly different amounts of time. And invested time is something that you have to deduct from the other projects you have on your desk.

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One thing though is something pretty independent of your expectations: people placed in your organisation during their education will not study at home. This is their first contact with real work, they probably live close to their education institution and have to commute a longer distance daily to reach your company, where everything is new and complicated. If they get home, they are exhausted. They have 8 hours a day to learn stuff, that is enough. There should not be homework, neither explicit or implied. If you want them to do something specific or learn something specific, give it to them as a task during their work day, as you would with any other employee.

Answer 3

I suspect part of the problem is that your organization has not effectively communicated what it expects from interns to the interns from the first time you took them on.

We took on some interns who are still in college from the request of one of their teachers

I'd have to wonder if you interviewed them or just took them on as a block, which is what it sounds like.

They should have had a process at the start that signaled to them that :

• this was not college and missed deadlines mean the company can lose business
• that they are being trusted to carry out tasks that, while perhaps not glamorous, do need to be done properly and enable others to complete their tasks. Note that school work does not have this kind of "chain" - they'll mostly be used to doing a task and failure only impacts them. This is a key difference between work and study.
• that in return for their effort the company will give them knowledge and experience of a real workplace.
• It is an opportunity for those that want to impress possible future employers to show their ability to learn to work effectively, because learning to work is different from learning knowledge.

I get the impression that to them it is being communicated, perhaps by the school, that this is "just" something they have to complete to pass the course. That would certainly explain their attitude to the process.

Your company needs to communicate the difference between what is expected of workers (interns) and students (which is what they may be thinking of themselves as).

Don't rely on the school to make this clear to them. Schools have their own goals and agendas and often the people teaching have relatively little (or no) experience of workplaces their students may end up at. They have an academic mindset and may even regard the internship as unimportant from their point of view.

It may not be too late to set this right with the existing interns, but it's something you whould consider for the next batch.

Answer 4

When I was ~30 I went back to college for computer science.

I was shocked at how my 18~20 year old undergraduate "peers" thought and acted.

To them, googling for how to perform a programming task or reading an existing answer on Stack Overflow (or any other source outside the course text) was cheating, not learning. Looking up related concepts or chasing down a trail of implication was alien, they just wanted to complete only tasks that were explicitly assigned to them, with minimal effort.

It's not that they were lazy (they put in the requisite hours trying to solve homework problems using the course text as a resource), but more that their entire world consisted of ticking off list items because some authority figure told them to. And can you blame them? For most of them that had literally been their entire waking life for the last decade+.

And thinking back, I'm pretty sure I had the exact same broken mental model of how the world worked when I was their age.

I've for the most part observed this same dynamic in others who went back to university or when through coding bootcamps as adults (with the necessary nod to survivorship bias) vs. fresh ~22 year old university grads, which leads me to believe that the disconnect is that you are expecting them to act like adults who just lack domain expertise, when they are to a large degree still children.

I'm not saying that you will have to wrangle them like small children, but you are going to have to help inculcate how to be an effective, professional employee. The expectations of the workplace are completely different than the expectations of primary school or an undergraduate program (which is perhaps an indictment of how we educate young people, but such is a topic for another time).

If you hang out much on Academia.SE you'll see the same thing happens to a lot of graduate and doctoral students: after almost 20 years of exclusively dancing to someone else's very specific tune they suddenly expect you to pick the music yourself and a lot of people struggle.

There are exceptions, people who through personal inclination or some other education (previous part-time jobs, parents, etc) already have a certain level of professionalism/self-motivation/what-have-you, but it isn't common and you can't just filter for those gems, there aren't enough of them.

So you're going to have to teach them. Teach them that when you say "go do X" what you're really saying is "go figure out how to do X on your own and report back to me if you run into issues". Because they expect a step-by-step guide, it's what they're used to.

I'm not the person on the scene but I suspect that since you aren't meeting that expectation and they don't know any different/better they're just filling their time with whatever they think productivity is supposed to look like, they simply don't know any differently.

Answer 5

The Accountability Loop Applies to Interns

• Set Expectations
• Observe performance
• Provide feedback and consequences
• Repeat

Answer 6

As an Intern in a company myself, It was made clear that having an internship can be and often is a great opportunity, we are also told that if we don't comply with the company's policy or dont do the assigned tasks, the internship WILL be terminated, (I dont know where the situation in the question is, but I'm talking about more specifically my experience in Portugal).

That being said, we get a grade from the person responsible for us at the job site (a worker / someone from the office where we are staying who we see / talk with in a daily basis). If said grade is bad / not the expected, our final grade will be reduced accordingly, both because it means we didnt learn what was expected and that it WILL give a bad image to the institution where we are learning from.

I dont really know how that would work for you / how possible it is, but give a feedback to the teacher responsible for the internship and maybe terminate the internship. (also try talking with the interns about said problems).