I was thinking back last week on why I started working at Fog Creek. If you don’t know, I got started on this thing called Project Aardvark, which eventually ended up becoming Copilot, the project I worked on for my first couple of years at Fog Creek. I don’t generally reminisce much about that time, simply because that was a very different point in my life, back before I found fashion, yet after I figured out how to end up in front of cameras constantly.
I’ve realized there are quite a few parallels between what got me into Fog Creek and what gets people hooked on hard-core drugs.
Not in the bad way, mind you. I have yet to see an intern maniacally chase source code into a dirty toilet, for example.[1] What I mean is, I almost feel like our internship is custom-tailored to pound the crap out our interns’ sense of awesome so that they just have to come back for more. Just, unlike with drugs, the effect is that they have a great summer, and they want to work for us, and I honestly feel they end up being way more productive in the process. What I find remarkable is that while nearly every part of Fog Creek has changed since my initial internship, the actual way we run our internships continues almost unedited.
I really want all the interns in the world to come work for us, but I also want all the interns in the world to have amazing summers, and the best way to do that is to tell you what we’re doing to get our interns hooked. So without further ado, I’m happy to begin my first and last guide to deliberately getting someone addicted.
Step 1: Get Them Excited
The first thing that matters is getting them psyched just to be there. When I was an Aardvark, that was easy: we knew we were going to be in a movie. Being in a movie is exciting. It’s even more exciting when the film-maker comes to your house before the summer starts just to interview you and film you doing a really botched version of a Chopin nocturne that he manages to edit so you sound competent. I mean, who could say no to that?
Our interns this year may not be excited because they’ll be in a movie, but they can be excited for a different reason: they’re going to be working on a young project that still has thousands of customers and manages over half a terabyte of data across nearly 25,000 active repositories. They’ll get a chance to be making a difference.
Find something that you yourself are excited about, and get your interns excited in that. Or, if you don’t have anything at your job that excites you, find another job. We’re hiring, after all.
Step 2: Get Them Doing Real Work
Of course, if the thing you’re getting your interns excited about is playing with a widely used application, it does require you let them, you know, touch the code. My first coding internship, at a company that shall remain nameless,[2] involved me writing a tremendous amount of Ruby code. That could be awesome, and in a way, it was. Except that the Ruby code I was writing were scripts to do things like automatically upload new advertisement photos to the intranet, collated by the date the photograph was taken. Or, when I wasn’t so lucky, it was to make a blog engine that could hold exactly one blog post, and then display a little red icon if the blog post it was showing at the time was Bad For The Company™. Not exactly central to the product, you know?
So at Fog Creek, we always make sure our interns are doing real stuff for the project they’re working on. When I was an intern on Aardvark, I wrote most of the Windows helpers. Other intern classes have written a new wiki for FogBugz, and given Kiln its API and its large files support. Hell, an intern class was integral to getting the first version of Kiln done in the first place. It feels so much better to actually be contributing code to something you know is going to make a real difference to the product.
Or, you know, have them write a one-post blog engine or whatever. It’s cool. Just make sure they know at the end of their internship that we’re still hiring.
Step 3: Give Them Instant Feedback
You know what sucks about automating some random task that you’ve been assigned to do as an intern? Getting absolutely no feedback on what anyone thinks about it. Is it useful? Does it stink? Who knows. It’s a fricking compilation of advertisements on a corporate intranet. For all I know, no one even reads this at all.[3]
With one exception,[4] Fog Creek interns always get to see Creekers using their code immediately, because we code right alongside them. We’re running their changes on our development systems, and, in many cases, running that code on our dogfood systems just a day or two after it’s written. Not only does this generally mean that our products are better, because we’re using new features heavily ourselves long before they ever reach our customer’s hands; it means that our interns are getting feedback almost immediately, both from within and outside their team, on what worked and what didn’t.
Or you can send feedback three weeks after the internship ends. By email. That works, too.
Step 4: Make Them Feel Awesome
People like feeling good. And the simple fact is, if you’re using your interns’ code almost immediately, and giving them rapid feedback, you’re going to end up having your interns produce really great stuff. So: tell them that.
Not in a fake way, mind you: some things just honestly take a lot of revisions before they’re good, no matter how awesome the people involved are, and your interns are going to know you’re offering them bull if you tell them something’s awesome that they know isn’t. But there’s all those intermediate steps, the little victories, the occasional big one, where you owe it to your team to acknowledge that, yup, they did well.
Saying “good job” is one way to show you care, but actually getting to know your interns is even better. At Fog Creek, we hang out with our interns outside of work by taking them to documentaries like Harry Potter 7, to Yankees “games”[5] at the new stadium, and, my personal favorite, to top-shelf-martini-powered bowling. If you don’t have these available in your town, take them to the airport so they can bond over a TSA freaky frisk-fest. The point is, do something with your interns so you actually get to know and like them as something other than a coding automaton.
Step 5: Ship, dammit!
But all of that comes to naught if you don’t actually ship stuff. Sure, maybe you worked on Kiln, and sure, maybe Kiln makes a difference to the company, and sure, maybe your boss likes you. But what about your own stuff? Do customers care? Does it just go into a bit bucket at the end of the summer, never to be seen again?
You see what I mean? It’s exactly like an addiction. Just because our interns are awesome, work on great products, and make a real difference, they get this crazy positive feedback loop that means they not only have a great summer, but that they want to keep coming back, again and again. We’ve literally had freshman interns who come back every single summer because they love it here so much. We’re doing something right.
And I hope that, if your interns aren’t already feeling the same way, this guide can help you get there. I remember what it was like to feel like an undervalued intern, and I remember what it was like to feel like I was king of the world.
Help your interns have their own king-of-the-world moments, and everyone wins.
I hate Trainspotting so hard. ↩︎
The East India Company. ↩︎
Actually, I know people read it, because I got bored and figured out how to use “DHTML” to log who was viewing the page. But you get the point. ↩︎
It turns out that, try as we might, even Fog Creek can’t achieve perfection. Just reallygoodtion, with an eye towards learningfromyourmistakesery. ↩︎
My editor informed me that calling them “Red Sox beat-downs” was not appropriate if I didn’t want to offend my audience. ↩︎
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