Vetting Interns, a practice in your Efficency

This year marks my 3rd year speaking at Arizona State University. I take time to visit and chat with CSE (Computer Systems Engineering) students of 216 and 316, as well as some clubs. I have noticed a few things over these last few years. Now my view is notably narrow because I have only been exposed to Arizona companies as a contractor and a few California based companies like SalesForce, and AAA. However, I would like to suggest an idea regarding Inters. In my view, I think it would be diligent to leverage the Continuous Delivery movement with the focus on DevOps providing push-button deployments to do the following.

In the process of selecting an Intern or a group of interns, companies should take their existing process for building products and services through DevOps and spin up "semi-Mocked" testing environments. Then obviously create fake data, or scrambled data from production and deploy this to the Mocked environment. This does 2 things. One it ensures the company understands more about its Data and structure. Two this forces the company to be effective and efficient in its deployment processes. Next, I recommend granting access to the environment to potential Inters and have a "Bug Battle". Then from those that find the most bugs the company can choose an inter or a group. This obviously gives the company a boost in the Quality area, as well as builds familiarity with their products and services. If it’s good word of mouth may spread that the company’s products and services are awesome. Of course, this also gives a boost to the marketing department, providing some market penetration in Academia.

I know that Google has a “contest” type of approach to their vetting process but I think it could work for many other companies by leveraging the DevOps/Continuous Delivery movement. Thoughts? Is this already happening?