"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote:

VanguardLH wrote:

I think we used interns for 6 months: the contract length. Never
again thereafter.

Why did you use them in the first place - was it because of some form of
state subsidy, of about that duration?

I wasn't in the decision loop. At a weekly status meeting, our manager
said, "Guess what?" followed by a groan. Whenever he said that, we'd
get quiet waiting for yet another edict from management.

Training (the same group that taught us) took care of classes,
instructional CDs, and documentation but QA did the progress monitoring
and tutoring to make sure the interns got up to speed in 2 weeks. We
stretched it to 3 weeks to also train them on our QA procedures. They
did okay during the training phase probably because it was similar to
school, but more accelerated, like a seminar. However, When they were
on their own to do the actual testing, and despite the retro tests were
complete (no decisions to make, and previously reviewed with feedback
from outside our group to make sure any tech could follow them), was
when they got, um, slow and "lost". We changed from weekly status
meetings to still doing those but with me going around to everyone (not
just interns) to get a daily status update to see who needed more help,
discover any snags, talk to the boss about possible resource
reallocation, or gauge the severity of peril to our testing schedule.

Maybe our expectation was too high. We had programmers that left
because they couldn't take the stress or didn't have the flair for
digging into a product to thoroughly test it. I got offered a
programming position but declined because it was too boring. We had
expection of getting and training new-hires, just as we were once, but
the interns just never became adept. Could be they knew they were going
back to just school and they'd be leaving us hence no motivation for
long-term motivation (although there was the prospect of getting hired
if they performed well). Would you keep going to the gym to stay
healthy if you knew you were getting killed in 6 months?