In truth, I was planning to post this last Frivolous Friday. Because, when it comes right down to it, the joke's really on me.
You
see a lot of the same faces at various Moncton technology-related
events. However, they're rarely the same faces. But as with middle- and high-school cliques, you'll find a scant handful of individuals
who can comfortably exist in multiple contexts. In this case, one of those individuals is a
student shortly due to graduate from one of the local colleges.
Said
college does not require (but will give credit for) what amounts to
internships. Mind you, those are not plentiful even in a booming
economy (into which category New Brunswick emphatically does NOT fall).
Now, it's stupefying to conceive of a situation in which businesses
have abused the system egregiously enough to (gasp!) force a change in
requirements--under a Conservative government, no less!. But that, in
fact, has actually happened in Canada. Thus, we can count on several
months of a reality in which unpaid grunt-work is not, in fact, the norm for
certain career-tracks. At least not until the lawyers find all the
loopholes and labour conditions disintegrate even further into the stuff of
Ayn Rand pr0n, anyway.
For all that, I (as a
freelancer) seriously doubt that the dearth of internship opportunities
can be blamed on the same oppressive regime which tyrannically imposes a lower
corporate tax rate than that of the United States. No. The reality is that
"branching off" tasks is actually pretty darned complex. There's the up-front
cognitive investment, certainly. One has to define tasks and metrics,
for starters. Also, to be prepared to do it all oneself in cases of
extreme failure. And Dread Cthulu help anyone who has employees.
Because the same ones who are perpetually "swamped" are inevitably the same ones who "don't have time" to train anyone else to take the load off. (Yeah, people are awesome, amirite?)
But there's a third barrier to the wide availability of internships, and I'll get to that in a bit.
In
the meantime, I have the luxury of not having the second problem. So
when a local college student (an older gentleman with an amiable
disposition and ridiculous amounts of hustle) informed me that (despite
all his networking) he didn't have an internship lined up, I airily
suggested that he make his own with a local non-profit. Then I (very) briefly
outlined a project that's about three or four rungs down on my personal
pro-bono "To Do" list. And followed up with the vague, "Oh, well, if
nothing else turns up, you know where to find me..."
That was last Tuesday night.
By last Thursday, he and his partner
had decided that they liked my idea better than what they had been
working on, and would I care to take a look at the project draft they'd
hammered out in the interim? And, oh, by the way, the app. has to be
turned in by April 15th...
Colour me wryly amused. But
also colour me a bit wiser. Not about making airy, open-ended
suggestions (when I should darned well know better) to ambitious college
students. Pffffft--that's just paying it forward after making
my own (second) internship all those years ago. (Plus, knowing
me, I'll always be that kind of stupid anyway.)
Uh-uh. The take-away for me is if interns don't
scare the ever-loving beejeebers out of you, you're in serious
trouble. Because, as it turns out, these two aspiring programmers aren't too shabby. The
UI specs that landed in my Inbox this evening had use cases I wouldn't
have thought of until the second (maybe third?) draft. That's not to
say these folks are bound for the next Y-Combinator cohort, but daaaaaaaaaang.
And
is that, I have to wonder, what prevents a lot of businesses from
pipelining students into their ranks while the latter are still in
school. Make no mistake: It's emphatically NOT FUN to be reminded of the fact that
someone else has the luxury (yea, even requirement) of using the Cool Tools(TM) while you're being paid to maintain boring legacy code with infuriating pay-per-seat software that long-gone manager once scored a sweet discount on.
Sure, you
can pooh-pooh their naivité ("Erhmehgerhd--where is your validation code!?!?!?").
But chances are, they'll internalise that lesson faster than even a
seasoned coder will absorb how Android configuration files are laid
out. In a world where coders halfway around the globe sell their
time/expertise at dime-store rates, it's the ability to, well, triage knowledge that's the key to survival. Oh, and having some hustle certainly doesn't hurt either.
Be afraid--be very afraid. And for love of Mammon, on-board some of these people if you know what's good for you.
