Is it common for an intern to get such an impactful project?
So you let them rewrite something that already works. If what they build is good, you‘ve just knocked out a good chunk of technical debt and found someone you probably want to hire. If not, they don’t get an offer. Either way you probably didn’t pay them much to begin with so there’s a lot of upside and not much downside.
And, of course, a company that puts this kind of work on the back of a temporary worker is not treating its own codebase with the respect it deserves. This is rolling the dice with your expertise store -- you have to hope they did it well, because they aren't going to be around to answer questions if they didn't.
The point is this was a well-specified, independent component with an existing functional implementation. This makes an ideal intern/temp/first project, because of those factors - it doesn't require deep knowledge of the organization or other services in the environment or business requirements. You build this, and if we like it, we use it and may give you a job offer.
Unless given other information, you can assume the company complied with the law with respect to paying the intern and the intern accepted the internship offer, and it sounds like he got a great experience out of it.
Yeah, and that logic is almost inherently a violation of labor law. The whole idea behind allowing "internships" at all is that the intern is deriving value (education) from the relationship that isn't captured by wages alone. The test for whether it's legal involves how much they are supervised by the people who are supposed to be teaching them.
Handing out throwaway projects like you posit is an easy trip to a class action suit.
> Handing out throwaway projects like you posit is an easy trip to a class action suit.
So if an intern shouldn't do work on the core product but also shouldn't do throwaway projects, what do you suggest an intern should do? What do you consider an "underpaid" intern? Would you consider 75% salary of campus new hire as underpaid?
You ask the intern to do work that you want them to succeed at and you think they will succeed at: like the example given.
If you’re recruiting on campus, you’re competing with other companies for the most promising candidates. If you come in with an unpaid internship, you’re going to get the leftovers.
I live with an HR exec and read some of this thread to her while she was cutting rhubarb for something she's baking.
She said (paraphrased), "Are you kidding? This is a perfect project for a summer intern. They won't have to take three months to get up to speed with all your internal systems, and of course there is educational value - they will get to see how some talented developers tackled the problem in one language while they translate it to another."
Most kids right out of school are honestly pretty decent coders. The internship is more about the professional skills than the technical ones.
I was an intern back in 1995 and they paid us $10/hour ($16.88 inflation adjusted) and they provided housing on a college dorm. To put that in perspective, the $650 I made after taxes every two weeks was the cost of tuition every quarter at the state school I attended. I made enough that summer to cover my entire senior year including books.
Yes the project was impactful, but there already was a reference implementation with a reference performance target. Worst case scenario, they would have been back to using the old implementation.