Our Summer Internship Program at CODEFUSION is going strong, even as it gets harder for young people to land their first job in IT. We see that as a bad direction for the whole industry, so instead of waiting for the market to thaw, we invest in new talent ourselves. This year six interns are going through our Summer Internship Program two each in July, August, and September working exactly like the rest of the team on production projects: they get tasks and complete them.
The August interns are working together on Prismetrix, a system that measures how changes introduced within a team affect its productivity and well-being, using the ABAB method, without requiring a deep dive into statistics. It lets you pick predefined metrics or define your own, and compare results before and after a change. The tasks they get span the whole stack frontend, backend, and testing.
What surprised one of them most was how poorly university prepares you for work on a larger project git and unit testing are only mentioned in passing there, and the jargon thrown around in daily scrums sent them searching online more than once. The skill they couldn’t have picked up alone turned out to be splitting a large, years-old project into smaller tasks and using version control to keep the results converging into one coherent whole.
The other was surprised to be handed work on a substantial project right away, built on a framework they had never used before, with real influence over its direction through tickets and analyses. The most valuable lesson, in their view, was working with several people on shared code using Git something university simply doesn’t teach, since coursework projects are assigned individually.
