Interns: "you are holding it wrong"

One of the facts that have surprised me more over the years at most companies is how underestimated interns are. So many jokes about the intern bringing down production on Friday night talk louder about the company than the intern. My hypothesis is that most people consider interns as a burden rather than a critical asset. If it sounds weird to you, is because "you are holding it wrong".

Let me elaborate on my background so you can understand where I'm coming from. I'm on the R&D technology sector, in a very unique country (Costa Rica). This creates a set of conditions:

• I have access to very good interns from Electric, Electronic, Mechatronic, Computer Engineering, and Computer Science. I can source them from local universities that for the most part provide very good quality graduates. This is not a casualty, I have worked for years to create a network of contacts with students and professors, so I can identify outstanding talent earlier.
• Costa Rica's universities calendar goes with the calendar year (usually 2 semesters). Internships are not a summer work, but rather a subject with credits in universities that last around 6 months. Interns must be paid and fulfill all local laws (taxes, social security), and we can extend the internship up to 1 year as long as they haven't graduated yet.

These conditions give me some advantages: with a minimum of 6 months there is enough time to achieve decent goals. But more importantly, these students are usually very smart girls and boys willing to prove themselves and are highly motivated (maybe I'm projecting because I remember loving getting paid for the first time in my life).

Now, turns out that in most companies people getting interns are just afraid of them screwing up because of the lack of experience, so they assign them clerical work or small side projects where they can be successful . This is a waste of the most important advantage that an intern has: their ability to fail. Let me elaborate.

Your failure budget

I came up with this concept (but I suspect someone smarter than me probably already coined and I haven't read their book) of a failure budget. My definition for failure budget is the percentage of the work you are doing that you can afford to fail. If you ask a manager in any big corp what is their failure budget I think you know what the answer would be.

The problem is that if you want to do any meaningful innovation you need to have a failure budget bigger than 0%. You need to try new approaches, new technologies, or explore different ideas. And this will not always work at the first try. You need to afford to fail.

But managers and regular engineers usually can't afford to fail. Guess who does? Right, the interns.

Recruiting the Avengers

My hiring pitch for an intern always includes one of my favorite Nick Fury quotes. I told them that I need them so they can fight the battles that we never could.

So my rule of thumb is that I will never give an intern the work that any employee could do if we were just less tight in schedule or resources. I will always pick up a project or idea of something I don't know myself, but catches my attention and instinct that could be useful for us. I also frame the goals of the project around the exploration of the technology, not the product of it.

This approach is empowering for the interns, because if you got really smart gals and guys they will shine with the right guidance and mentoring. They feel appreciated and with a purpose.

The outcomes

After 20 years working in R&D, I can tell you this: any big, significant or relevant technology that deeply impacted our capabilities was always started as a crazy idea that we gave to an intern. Many of those interns grew into senior positions in our organizations.

Another way to frame it is: I have never seen a revolutionary or innovative change coming from the plan-of-record.

Off-course not all of our crazy projects paid off. I would say about 30% of them did. But those that did are still a home-run to this day.

Let me know what you think about this approach, and thanks for reading this far.