Should an intern expect quality from the workplace?

Question

I work in the IT department of a large company.

My department does consultancy for other IT companies, and my internship is focused on software testing, quality assurance and assisting my coworkers and my manager on whatever technical issues may happen. In the end, I do some kind of tech support and infrastructure support, and help my manager to deal with things on a day-to-day basis.

I am learning a lot in my internship. I make some mistakes (my first topic here is an example), but in the end, everyone likes my performance and I get along with most of my colleagues. Everyone expects, including my manager, that I will get a full-time job there in the end.

However, in the end I figured out that I hate it there. My manager has an "embrace the world" vision and isn't available when me or the other co-workers need him, and brings in projects that he doesn't even know the team can handle. He has some ideas from nowhere that sometimes go against the vision of other coworkers and in the end I have to deal with the heat. My department has a lot of issues that most of my colleagues complain about, but in the end they just decide to ignore them and move on. While we sell process improvement, we work in anarchy. My coworkers solve issues in any way they see fit, leaving a trail of mess in the process for the next one to figure out and my manager endorses it under the lines of "just make it work, no matter how".

A few months ago, I started to send some emails pointing out some of the things that I thought would help in the end. I expected a big no, because I'm an intern, and interns don't know nothing, but I got something that looked like "great idea, but not the focus right now".

This internship has brought me a lot of knowledge. But I don't like it anymore. Everytime I look at our infrastructure, I see a mess, and my first instinct is to set it on fire and make some sense out of it. And other people think the same, but few try to do something to improve it.

But in the end, I'm an intern. I don't have any experience in the industry. My manager values my opinions (sometimes even follows it), but why should I fix things that people more experienced than me already think are fixed?

Should an intern demand quality from his workplace? Should an intern have an active voice and try to improve things? Or just enjoy the ride, learn and see where it goes?

Answer 1

I am going to be blunt. Most of the time an intern does not have the credibility or knowledge to drive organizational change. Nor are interns considered to be long-term employees so they automatically have less credibility even if they are delivering things.

To be successful at driving organizational change you first have to have a track record of success and then you need to have soft skills because organizational change is all about selling your ideas. Further, what appear to be good ideas to the inexperienced are often things that others have tried before that failed or are overtly idealistic or just don't fit the current constraints.

In the business world things are done on a priority basis, you have to have some pretty good sales skill to make someone change the priorities they currently have to make the change you want to see. The basis for setting priorities lies in several things, first and foremost priorities are political. Next the people setting the priorities are often looking to minimize cost or make more short-term profit or looking to have something that will look good when they move on to a new job. An ideal system delivered in December is not going to win over a thrown together system that mostly works that is delivered in June and has six extra months of sales coming in.

One thing you have to realize if that pretty much every employer is a mess. There are no ideal workplaces.There are no meritocracies. There are no perfect code bases or 100% interesting projects.

This is not to say that you can't drive change and improve things in most workplaces, but you need to realize that you will never make things perfect only less messy. There are many things that drive this but generally business needs trump everything else and what the users need often seems strange to the dev and the things that many idealistic devs find important are irrelevant to the business.

In a startup for instance the drive to be first to market is stronger than the need to make everything perfect. They will knowingly put buggy code out to meet the deadlines intending to fix it later (but of course later hardly ever comes unless the bug is really bad or the users are very cranky). It is always on the the next cool thing at many of these places (one reason why many fail because they forget it is a business not a way to play with cool toys).

In the Enterprise programming, the users are king. THey are directly paying the salaries of the people who are programming, so they have the final say on priorities and features.

In the consulting world, it is the clients who drive the workload. If a client wants it, it gets done. If not, well that was a nice idea. Maybe some other client later will want to do it. If a client wants you to use SQL Server and C# (because they own the licenses and have support people who know them and all the rest of their code is written with this), then you had better not deliver a product using mySQl and Java even if you as a dev think those are better choices for the problem at hand.

Interns rarely think about improvements and consider the business needs at the same time. This is part of what you need to be learning as an intern, the world is not and never will be ideal.

As an intern, you should be learning to observe how change is being driven in the organization. You should be looking to see whose voice is listened to the most and then try to figure out what that person does that is different from the people who fail to get their ideas across. You should be perfecting your technical skills and starting to learn how organizations work. What you should not be doing is trying to drive organizational change.

Answer 2

Should an intern demand quality from his workplace? Should an intern have an active voice and try to improve things? Or just enjoy the ride, learn and see where it goes?

Interns don't get to 'demand' anything. You're free to ask questions and yes, you can have an active voice. I would warn about being constantly critical though, this does not sit well with either colleagues or management.

Mainly you should focus on learning and let the managers handle their jobs.

Answer 3

My manager values my opinions (sometimes even follows it), but why should I fix things that people more experienced than me already thinks that is fixed?

Ever consider how you may see things differently and thus you may notice things your manager misses? Ever consider that you may have better ideas than what was done previously?

Should an intern demand quality from his workplace?

Depends on what you mean by demand and what kind of power the intern has. If the intern is the son of the founder, there could be nepotism that allows things to be done differently than was done previously. On the other hand, if you are just a nobody then depending on the culture your view may be taken in several possible directions.

Also, what kind of threshold do you have and how well do you understand how the business works as if you plan to keep technical debt to zero in companies, good luck with that.

Should an intern have an active voice and try to improve things?

Yes, though this is partially learning about how things are done and what kinds of adjustments could be made. Some places may need some fresh blood to get things flowing well again and others may be places that are fine.

Or just enjoy the ride, learn and see where it goes?

That is how some may view it and if it works for them, what is the harm?

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Ultimately, I'd see this as a crash course in office politics. Some places may play games about how to make change happen and some places may be more open and agile, pun intended.