Student Hackers: DO NOT Intern...BUILD.

Build what, though? Most of the ideas young programmers come up with on their own are unoriginal--the world doesn't really need another to-do list app. Getting a job or internship first can expose you to actual business problems and domain knowledge, plus give you some good contacts and references, and help you save up some money to use when bootstrapping your own product. Working for someone else is not all bad, even if building your own thing is your ultimate goal.

What did I learn from this article? I learned that a college junior at the University of Michigan will stop talking to me, and won't be impressed with my resume, if I take a summer internship. Great.<p>Obviously, a student could learn a lot working on a personal project over a summer. That could be a great way to go.<p>On the other hand, the initial exposure to the operations of a successful company bombards an intern with valuable information. He or she will discover that some things function extremely well and some things don't quite make sense, learn basic business etiquette, learn how things scale, etc. All of this information can be extremely valuable when you're ready to grow your own company.<p>I'm sick posts telling young people to "DO this, NOT that, or ELSE!" What works for you might not work for someone else. There isn't one path to success. This an extremely limiting view of the world.

While I generally agree with this sentiment, I think there are other good reasons to intern at big companies: getting contacts, learning from more experienced engineers, learning industry practices that you would never pick up through tutorials, and getting active criticism on your code from other professionals. The peril with being self-taught is that you'll pick up a few bad habits along the way.<p>Money is also an issue. <i>A viable option for students is to try and freelance during one of their summers.</i> You would need to spend some time before the summer trying to drum up a few months worth of work, but this might offer an acceptable compromise: if you're the sole freelancer, you'll have full ownership of the product, you'll learn a tiny bit about being entrepreneurial, and you'll also have spare time to work on your own projects. You might even make more than you would interning (assuming you're a Facebook-caliber intern).<p>Maybe the best "path" for a student to take is to spend his/her first two summers at a big tech company and a startup, and then spend his/her last summer freelancing and working on personal projects.

While I understand that for entrepreneurial CS students, interning at a startup or building something awesome over a summer is ideal, I think that<p>1) the vast majority of students would be unable to find a sexy startup to work with and 2) you are vastly undervaluing the benefit of learning best practices and industry standards, which you will get plenty of at a decent-sized company.<p>Far better (and likely) IMHO to get a job at a (probably medium-sized rather than large) company where you will get to do both new coding as well as code maintenance (learning to read someone else's code is a vastly undervalued skill that you won't learn "building something awesome"), learn as much as possible from their senior engineers, and then start building something cool on the side that isn't a stinking heap of unmaintainable feces like most undergraduate-level code I've ever seen.<p>If you're a Rock Star Ninja who happens to be able to write quality code straight out of school, good for you, but I think most software developers out there would rather work with someone who's spent a year or two in apprentice mode as low man on some company's totem pole, rather than some hotshot out of school who probably turns up his nose at RDBMS's and Java.

I figured this would happen. In the comments already posted, it is obvious people aren't reading my entire post and missing key details. 'Twas expected, I guess (sigh). I figure since it is my post, I'll address some of the comments below:<p>"Working for someone else is not all bad, even if building your own thing is your ultimate goal." -Kyllo<p>I am not saying it's bad at all! It's perfectly fine to work for someone else but if you are entrepreneurial-minded, it's best to intern at either a startup or a completely unrelated field to what you are used to, SO that you may be able to find an area in that industry where software/hardware can optimize it.<p>"There is a huge difference between that. A good job will have some nice engineers there, that might be willing to help you out and push you to learn how to code correctly." -stevoo<p>So the main reason to intern is to just become a better coder? Doubtful. Just to be completely blunt, the main reason college students intern is to have a secure job after graduation.<p>"Interning was a great start for me and helped me meet a ton of people. The difference was I interned at a startup." -blakeshall<p>Yeah I explicitly say this in my post! Working for a startup is completely reasonable as you will hopefully be able to directly help with the companies' organic idea.<p>"it's just not very appealing to take risks with your finances" -iansinke<p>There is very little risk taking with finances in the sense that you really don't have to spend anything to build. What you are losing is the money that COULD be made doing a summer internship. Being an entrepreneur is risky, though, so this risk will have to be taken at some point if you want to exercise that desire, right? Better now in college than after where you really will be taking risks with your finances (living expenses while trying to have a startup).<p>My Takeaway: This post should be titled differently because it seems that people are just reading the title and not the actual post.<p>I also may have not taken into account the money aspect as much (I promise I am not a snob)...I guess if money is an issue and you need to work, then interning is fine but at least do it at a company that will help to enhance your entrepreneurial mind! I actually do make explicit mention that working elsewhere IS reasonable.

&#62; Take risks and have fun.<p>I'd love to take risks and have fun, but when you're in college, looking for good, steady, well-paid, full-time summer employment, it's just not very appealing to take risks with your finances. I'm there right now (although an ECE major, not CS) and I wouldn't trade anything for the paid co-op placement I have right now.

As another University of Michigan student, this extreme enterpreneurial mindset seems incredibly arrogant to me. “I have nothing to learn from those more experienced than me, I can do everything by myself, and as a 20-year-old, I understand how to solve the world’s most important problems.“

I'm sorry, but if I had had the opportunity to be an intern at Facebook when I was in college, I would have done so in a heartbeat. It doesn't matter if they implement the feature they put me on. The contacts and experience gained are the main reason for interning.

<i>let me make myself clear that I am ONLY referring to the CS majors who claim to be entrepreneurial at heart. </i><p>I know very few CS majors who can decide how entrepreneurial when they are that young. Everyone is pretty much entrepreneurial when you are in college - you want to create the next facebook or send the next rocket to space, but actually having the guts to do that is another story.<p><i>When graph search came out, he said he had worked on the Graph Search Project but the specific part that he had worked on was not implemented at all. How disappointing, huh?</i><p>Not disappointing at all. He did build something and in the process he most likely learned a myriad of intangible skills (project management, working with people, social skills, communication skills, etc) Those lessons are invaluable to the real business world.<p>Many of the skills required in today's jobs (not just the bubble of SV we all sit in here at HN) are learned at big companies, doing nothing but working with other people. Communication skills are often misunderstood and often seen as secondary to technical skills. As many experienced will attest to, many of today's software errors aren't a result of poor technical ability but rather poor communication. No offense to the OP, but his writing skills are clearly not great. In the land of startups, I'd be scared as an investor/customer (any stakeholder for that matter) trying to properly communicate with him.<p>EDIT: Also forgot to add this: <i>"Professional networks were important to the success of their current businesses for 73 percent of the entrepreneurs. In comparison, 62 percent felt the same way about personal networks."</i>[1] That's something you will definitely get in a big company. [1]<a href="http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/the-anatomy-of-an-entrepreneur.aspx#" rel="nofollow">http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/the-anatomy-of-a...</a>

I'm somewhat confused by the observation that the first choice for CS majors is to be an entrepreneur. Shouldn't the motivation for CS be either theory (academics) or practice (build stuff), but not "starting a business"?<p>Being an entrepreneur is something that is either your primary ambition, in which case you don't start studying CS, or something that grows out of the ambition to use your skills and knowledge to make something happen.<p>Studying CS with the ambition to become an entrepreneur seems like it's based on the notion that "that's were the easy money is". In my experience, those kind of people aren't good at either being a maker or an entrepreneur.

Full disclosure, I'm looking for an intern in Madrid starting ASAP. So if you are interested don't hesitate to contact me :) (details on my profile) we work with Ruby, we are agile and we will mentor you :)<p>I'll say... do an internship but be careful where and with who. Working in a small startup for a handful of months will show you how a company works inside-out, and probably will allow you to do networking with interesting people. Go where you can get a good mentor.<p>Of course, if you intern in a big-corp just to be a code-monkey it might not be that fruitful (even though you might still learn about 'real life programming' or big architecture).

I spent many of my student holidays hacking on stuff. That was really great and I learned many technologies/languages that we never touched at university.<p>But I also did two internships, one at a big, one at a small company. They were incredibly valuable : I learned about real-world (unit) testing, code reviews (by people more competent than me), working with a big infrastructure, having deadlines, etc... Those are all skills that are really useful for any programmer and they're helping me now that I'm working on a project that I hope will become a startup.

Great post. The internships at big name brands are perfect if you want a good job at a good company after school. However, the best jobs at the best companies (which may be your own) are going to be reserved for those that learned in 3 months what takes people at a large company 1-2 years to learn.<p>As Adam Pritzker from GA said, "The cost of building technology is dropping so low that people can actually afford to take the risk to learn by doing something that, in our minds, is a much more effective way to learn than anything else."

I'm a student hacker currently in my third year of a 4 year masters course. Last summer I interned at a startup in London working on iOS apps, some from the ground up, some just updates. It was a good experience, although I had to work on my side project during my lunchtimes, evenings and weekends.<p>This summer I plan to work with a buddy of mine on my CS course. We have an idea in mind that I've already been working on (www.housequest.co.uk), but really we just want to work on something for three months and try to create something useful.<p>In the end, I'd say it's a good idea to obtain an internship for one of your summers in university. Although you don't get much time to work on other cool stuff, I believe you'll benefit from it in other ways. It's a good fall back plan for when you leave university, as past experience accounts for a lot. Secondly, you learn a lot. I was building iOS apps before my internship, but building them professionally was completely different. I was doing silly things. Lastly, it's good for networking with professionals.<p>The other summers you can then use to build even better software.

Can you really not think of any good reasons for students to intern at a large engineering company other than the paycheck/a fear of being unemployed?

I started developing Android apps in 2009, teaching myself gradually by building a GitHub client (as the official app did not exist then). Three years later (2012), I graduated from high school. I was offered a chance to intern for the summer at GitHub, but a few things got in the way of me doing that.<p>However, nearing the end of July I stumbled into my first contract job after helping out in #android-dev on Freenode. I'm now almost a year out of high school, still indecisive as to whether I'm going to college in the Fall (the same things that prevented me from interning at GitHub prevented me from going to college last year), and I am gradually building up my portfolio. Every recruiter I've talked to over the past few months have made a point to note how filled-out my resume is for someone my age. I guess my point is that I probably would not have been in that chat room at that time had I been interning in California.

The problem is I <i>needed</i> my summer internships at university to be able to afford to live for the next year.<p>"Building" over the summer would have been really fun, and the benefits of a 9-5 was that when I got home I worked on some of my projects which I had ignored during the school year.

An internship is effectively getting paid to learn. Maybe there are better choices for the company to work with but hey, you may never get another chance to learn how Facebook builds things. If you get an opportunity to get a look at software development in a household name take it. Hell if someone offered to have me come code with them at their company for a day on one of my days off I would take it in a second. It's incredibly valuable to get a chance to look at a company's practices, culture, and the general feel of things there. You're not committing for years, you're committing for a summer. Enjoy it. If you decide later that being an entrepreneur isn't working for you for whatever reason having a big name on your resume and contacts in the industry can be a huge leg up.

Same thing applies to politics. Don't beg for change. Make it. (And right now we need more P2P.)

In Norway I have yet to meet a fellow informatics student who has interned at all, ever.<p>Finding a summer job (with good pay) is easy here. If you are on your final year of bachelors or first year of masters then not getting a summer job is literally impossible if you actually want one (ie. apply). Companies will even take you in with rubbish grades if you seem ok, just to test you for two months in order to see if you might be suitable for the company once you graduate.

As a student, I agree, but it's not this simple. My parents still expect me to get a job, and I need something to do other than just sit in my room all day on my computer. It's nice to have people to talk to, and I don't have any friends who are entrepreneurial and hackers who can be a good cofounder or whatever. It doesn't seem like there are any great solutions to these problems, but maybe I'm not looking/thinking hard enough.

Interning was a great start for me and helped me meet a ton of people. The difference was I interned at a startup. The problem is that they are sometimes hard to find, and you'll probably have to travel. Many students I've talked to don't know where to find smaller companies that offer internships. The big companies give the most money to colleges and in turn that's what most students are exposed too.

I disagree. I've always loved programming and building things in my free time, but I had no idea how a technical business operated.<p>Interning for a tech company gave me an invaluable opportunity to network and learn about business strategy, workflow, etc.<p>I think young programmers need to learn through experience how a successful company operates before they try to start one on their own.

Such condescending tone for someone that hasn't done much for himself (or even lived long enough to do so). You might wanna lay off the sage advice until you actually become a sage. Or, maybe you could express your opinion on the matter without the snide remarks and presumptuous attitude towards those that disagree with you.

Intren.<p>You won't be able to do this later in life while time to build you'll have plenty.

What about the value of experience seeing how the big boys handle large software projects? Getting the chance to work with and be mentored by more experienced developers? Knowing what the inside of a profitable software business looks like?

although in an ideal world this is excellent advice; however many students aren't fortunate enough to have their school bankrolled for them and need to work throughout the summer to pay for their education.<p>Big companies offer pretty outstanding pay when you're interning, helping you pay for college.<p>I do agree that building is something which is invaluable; however while in college before you've really been proven and shown off development skills to work at a startup or have funds to work on a new idea you're really forced into a corner for working on side things in your spare time.