Thoughts on Startup Internships

(This article is severely delayed because I forgot it in drafts)

Over the summer I had the opportunity to work with two bright young minds at Letta~here's what happened:

We decided to setup a internship program this year because we felt it could be an interesting and low-risk experiment in the effectiveness of interns in early stage startups, as well as give back to those early into their career by showing them how startups are.

I had some time to reflect now that they’ve left on what it means to have an intern at a startup, both for them and you.

Having interns was not a light decision to make, especially for startup. An intern is someone who is new and ready to learn, they have some knowledge from previous experiences but are in no way masters or even intermediates. There are some students that apply for internships that work as good as junior or even mid-level engineers, but those are exceptions to the rule. Most interns are there to learn how to execute not be hired for their execution skills.

With that in mind, you as a startup need to understand that you’ll be spending time to ramp up and guide interns to be successful. The interview process is a filter on your end to figure out who is the best at learning and the best fit for your guidance style.

My intern I picked because they were quick on their feet and adaptable, they had taste and opinions, and I felt like I could lead them to success. I think though I was a bit overwhelmed for a bit of it, we ended up with two interns; which was a lot to deal with, especially when you’re coding, designing and refining product. You need to make the time to make it work for both of you.

What I did was I let them shadow my work, as well as put them in a situation where they’re essentially full members of the team. They had to understand specs, they had to come up with a plan and they had to execute from there. I think when you’re in school you really only focus on learning fundamentals not necessarily executing them, so I felt like for my interns, most of my work had to be translating fundamentals to execution.

Those three months were an exciting time at my company, our team learned so much gen-z lingo and culture that I feel like our vocabulary had changed for the better (or worse). We also gained perspective on usage patterns of younger users, and got some fresh opinions on how we could execute certain products. We also got a bunch of work done.

There’s a big downside to interns, and I knew this coming into it: interns are a hindrance on your productivity, you’ll spend less time executing and more time guiding and reviewing. You can of course shirk those responsibilities, but you’re going to do a disservice to them and yourself as they don’t really learn as fast or effective and you get a pile of tech debt you will spend months refactoring after. For a really early stage startup, this could be very damaging unless you really know what you’re in for, otherwise you’re in a world of hurt.

Now, are engineering interns worth it if you run a startup? The answer is it depends, if your very UX product heavy or consumer facing, I think the pros of fresh ideas and perspective outweigh the downsides of productivity. Anything else, I'd lean no, unless you really want to devote the time to do it. Not saying it will be a mistake, but if you're an early career founder, I would recommend instead grabbing those would-be interns as cofounders and risk it all together.

Was it worth it for us? I think yes, we found some capable students who loved to build, and we had a fun time too. I think our team had enough experience to manage them and it did not detract from our mission. Would I do it again? Yes! But only because I wanted to put the extra time in. If I didn't want to help others grow and just wanted cheap workers, I'd just not do it. It doesn't make sense.